People often question me about why I stress the importance of reading Charles Darwin's writings rather than relying on modern textbook presentations of evolutionary biology. After all, hasn't there been great progress in biological science since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species a 150 years ago? This is certainly true. But it is also true that in many respects Darwin's original understanding of evolution is superior to the prevailing views of today's "Neo-Darwinians." Contemporary proponents of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins tell us that biological evolution is ultimately reducible to the natural selection of random genetic mutations. More and more critics are pointing out the flaws in such a genetic reductionist view of evolution, and they are arguing that we need to explain the complex interaction of multiple levels of evolution that cannot be reduced to the gene-centered view of Neo-Darwinism. But if one studies Darwin's writings, one notices that what these critics are proposing is actually a return to Darwin's original theory.
Consider Darwin's summary of his theory in the last paragraph of the Origin:
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing a Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Notice that Darwin states his "laws" of evolution in a very general and abstract way--the laws of reproduction, inheritance, variability, and struggle for life. If some entities can reproduce themselves, if these entities show heritable variation, and if some of this heritable variation affects their chances of surviving and reproducing in the competitive struggle for existence, then evolution by natural selection will occur. Stated in such a general way, these laws could apply as well to the evolution of human culture as to the evolution of animal anatomy. And, in fact, much of Darwin's Descent of Man is a study of the cultural evolution of human morality.
Notice also that Darwin thinks that heritable variation can arise from "the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse." This means that Darwin embraces Lamarck's idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. So the common story that Darwin overthrew Lamarckianism is false.
In the 1930s, the "Modern Synthesis" of evolutionary biology combined a Neo-Darwinism that rejected all Lamarckianism with Mendelian genetics. It was assumed that genes were the only units of heredity, that variations in genes are random and not affected by the developmental history of the individual, and that selection favors individuals with genes that make them more adapted to their environment than others. Consequently, evolution was understood as some change in the genetic composition of some group of organisms.
In recent decades, empirical research and theoretical arguments have thrown this Modern Synthesis of Neo-Darwinism into doubt, because it seems that a gene-centered theory cannot fully account for the evolution of life. Some people are even saying that this is an intellectual revolution that will destroy Darwinism.
One of the best critiques of Neo-Darwinism is by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (MIT Press, 2005). But rather than overturning Darwinism, Jablonka and Lamb see their critique as a renewal of Darwin's Darwinism.
The argument of Jablonka and Lamb is that in evolution the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, and that these multiple dimensions of inheritance show a Lamarkian evolution of acquired characters, just as Darwin believed.
To illuminate their general point, Jablonka and Lamb use an analogy to show how different systems of heredity can work along with the genetic system. We can think of a piece of music that is represented by a score, the notes written on paper. This score can be copied as it is passed on through the generations. Although a few mistakes in copying might occur over time, generally the score will be accurately transmitted. We might then see the relationship between the musical score and the musical performance as analogous to the relationship between a genotype and a phenotype in biology. Although mutations in the genotype will be transmitted to future generations, changes in the phenotype will not be transmitted, and so the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters does not occur.
But with the invention of new means of transmitting music--such as musical recordings and broadcasts--it becomes possible to transmit the musical performance (the "phenotype") by inheritance. It is also possible that popular performative interpretations of the music might bring notational changes in the score, and in this way the musical "phenotype" would change the musical "genotype."
In a similar way, Jablonka and Lamb argue, there are systems of inheritance beyond the genetic system that allow phenotypic variations to be transmitted across generations. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three systems, but also a fourth--the symbolic system. The full complexity of evolution arises from the intricate interaction of these four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, which correspond to various levels of complexity from the genome to cells to organisms to groups.
The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Jablonka and Lamb accept this as true, but they also criticize genetic reductionism and determinism for failing to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.
The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.
The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone, and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.
The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. What Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (600-200 B.C.) would be an example of a turning point in the symbolic evolution of humanity, in which Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and Plato acted as agents of symbolic innovation that has been inherited across the generations for the last two thousand years.
Neo-Darwinian theorists can hardly deny the reality of symbolic or cultural evolution. So they have developed their own theories of how this works. Dawkins is famous for his theory of "memetics"--the idea that "memes" (units of cultural replication) can evolve as "viruses of the brain." The evolutionary psychologists (like John Tooby and Leda Cosmides) explain cultural evolution as a historical process of social learning constrained by the genetically evolved biases of the brain. Although Jablonka and Lamb see some partial truth in these approaches, they also see them as inadequate for explaining the uniqueness of symbolic evolution as shaped through the constructive activities of individual and social agents in history.
The four-leveled account of evolution could explain Aristotle's biological studies of political animals. Human beings are not the only political animals, Aristotle observed, but human beings are more political than the other political animals because the human capacity for logos--speech or conceptual reasoning--allows human beings to organize their political life around shared conceptions of the good and the just. Jablonka and Lamb might say that while human beings share with other animals a capacity for political culture based on behavioral inheritance, only human beings have a capacity for political symbolism that creates a shared symbolic meaning for political life.
I will be writing more posts on these four dimensions of evolution.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Jablonka symbolism. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Jablonka symbolism. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Does Evolution Explain Human Nature?
Does evolution explain human nature?
That's the question posed by the John Templeton Foundation to a dozen scholars of biology--Francisco Ayala, Francis Collins, Eva Jablonka, Lynn Margulis, Geoffrey Miller, Simon Conway Morris, Martin Nowak, Joan Roughgarden, Jeffrey Schloss, Frans de Waal, David Sloan Wilson, and Robert Wright. Each wrote a brief essay in response. All of the essays can be found on the Templeton website.
These essays challenge four of the major misconceptions about evolutionary explanations of human nature. It is often said that such evolutionary reasoning (1)promotes atheism, (2) assumes genetic determinism, (3) subverts morality, and (4)denies the wondrous mysteries of life.
All of these authors accept the truth of evolutionary reasoning in explaining--either partly or entirely--the complexity of human nature. Some of them are religious believers, and two of them (Collins and Nowak) write about their Christian beliefs. Some of the others speak about the importance of explaining the evolutionary origins of religiosity.
That genetic determinism is insufficient for explaining human nature is a major theme for nine of the authors (Ayala, Collins, Jablonka, Margulis, Miller, Morris, Nowak, Schloss, and Wilson). Margulis speaks about "symbiogenesis, the evolution of new species from the coming together of members of different species," and this goes beyond random genetic mutations. Many of these authors stress the importance of cultural evolution, particularly through the human capacity for symbolism. An evolutionary explanation of human nature requires an account of the complex interaction of genetic evolution and cultural evolution.
The most interesting essay on the multi-leveled character of human evolution is Jablonka's. She suggests that an evolutionary explanation of human nature would have to reformulate Aristotle's biological psychology in an evolutionary framework. Aristotle explained human nature--particularly in the De Anima--as manifesting three levels: goal-directed living systems, animal mentality, and human thought. She argues that evolutionary explanations must move through these levels. We need to define evolution as "the set of processes that lead to changes in the nature and frequency of heritable types in populations over time." These "heritable types" include "genotypes, types of transmissible epigenetic (that is, developmentally acquired) variations, types of socially learned animal behavior, and types of symbol-based transmitted information." Jablonka's reasoning is elaborated in her book Evolution in Four Dimensions, which supports the same complex view of human evolution that I will develop in my new book.
Against the claim that a Darwinian view of human nature denies the importance of morality, six of the authors (Ayala, Collins, Jablonka, Margulis, de Waal, Wilson, Wright) emphasize the importance of morality for human evolution. Although the capacity for human morality is rooted in human genetic evolution, the development of moral experience depends on human cultural evolution.
Here is where I would say that we need to move through three levels of analysis--natural order, customary order, and deliberate judgment. The evolutionary history of human morality shows the universality of moral sentiments, the variability of moral traditions, and the individuality of moral judgments.
Many people think that evolutionary explanations of human nature gloss over the deep mysteries of the human condition. But some of these authors (especially, Collins, Nowak, and Wright) insist that evolutionary science forces us to confront the inescapable mysteries of human life. Collins writes: "We see science as the way to understand the awesome nature of God's creation and as a powerful method for answering the 'how' questions about the universe. But we also see that science is powerless to answer the fundamental 'why' questions, such as 'Why is there something instead of nothing?,''Why am I here?,' and 'Why should good and evil matter?'" Nowak speaks of "the mystery and purpose of life, which cannot be answered by natural science alone." And Wright points to two "awe-inspiring mysteries"--the mystery of the cosmic First Cause and the mystery of consciousness.
Nowak thinks another kind of mystery is manifested in mathematics: "the great theorems of mathematics are statements of an eternal truth that comes from another world, a world that seems to be entirely independent of the particular trajectory that biological evolution has taken on earth." We must wonder how "evolution has led to a human brain that can gain access to a Platonic world of forms and ideas."
The conclusion I draw from all these essays is that an evolutionary explanation of human nature requires a combination of all the traditional intellectual disciplines--in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--as we strive for a Darwinian liberal education in pondering the deepest questions of human existence.
That's the question posed by the John Templeton Foundation to a dozen scholars of biology--Francisco Ayala, Francis Collins, Eva Jablonka, Lynn Margulis, Geoffrey Miller, Simon Conway Morris, Martin Nowak, Joan Roughgarden, Jeffrey Schloss, Frans de Waal, David Sloan Wilson, and Robert Wright. Each wrote a brief essay in response. All of the essays can be found on the Templeton website.
These essays challenge four of the major misconceptions about evolutionary explanations of human nature. It is often said that such evolutionary reasoning (1)promotes atheism, (2) assumes genetic determinism, (3) subverts morality, and (4)denies the wondrous mysteries of life.
All of these authors accept the truth of evolutionary reasoning in explaining--either partly or entirely--the complexity of human nature. Some of them are religious believers, and two of them (Collins and Nowak) write about their Christian beliefs. Some of the others speak about the importance of explaining the evolutionary origins of religiosity.
That genetic determinism is insufficient for explaining human nature is a major theme for nine of the authors (Ayala, Collins, Jablonka, Margulis, Miller, Morris, Nowak, Schloss, and Wilson). Margulis speaks about "symbiogenesis, the evolution of new species from the coming together of members of different species," and this goes beyond random genetic mutations. Many of these authors stress the importance of cultural evolution, particularly through the human capacity for symbolism. An evolutionary explanation of human nature requires an account of the complex interaction of genetic evolution and cultural evolution.
The most interesting essay on the multi-leveled character of human evolution is Jablonka's. She suggests that an evolutionary explanation of human nature would have to reformulate Aristotle's biological psychology in an evolutionary framework. Aristotle explained human nature--particularly in the De Anima--as manifesting three levels: goal-directed living systems, animal mentality, and human thought. She argues that evolutionary explanations must move through these levels. We need to define evolution as "the set of processes that lead to changes in the nature and frequency of heritable types in populations over time." These "heritable types" include "genotypes, types of transmissible epigenetic (that is, developmentally acquired) variations, types of socially learned animal behavior, and types of symbol-based transmitted information." Jablonka's reasoning is elaborated in her book Evolution in Four Dimensions, which supports the same complex view of human evolution that I will develop in my new book.
Against the claim that a Darwinian view of human nature denies the importance of morality, six of the authors (Ayala, Collins, Jablonka, Margulis, de Waal, Wilson, Wright) emphasize the importance of morality for human evolution. Although the capacity for human morality is rooted in human genetic evolution, the development of moral experience depends on human cultural evolution.
Here is where I would say that we need to move through three levels of analysis--natural order, customary order, and deliberate judgment. The evolutionary history of human morality shows the universality of moral sentiments, the variability of moral traditions, and the individuality of moral judgments.
Many people think that evolutionary explanations of human nature gloss over the deep mysteries of the human condition. But some of these authors (especially, Collins, Nowak, and Wright) insist that evolutionary science forces us to confront the inescapable mysteries of human life. Collins writes: "We see science as the way to understand the awesome nature of God's creation and as a powerful method for answering the 'how' questions about the universe. But we also see that science is powerless to answer the fundamental 'why' questions, such as 'Why is there something instead of nothing?,''Why am I here?,' and 'Why should good and evil matter?'" Nowak speaks of "the mystery and purpose of life, which cannot be answered by natural science alone." And Wright points to two "awe-inspiring mysteries"--the mystery of the cosmic First Cause and the mystery of consciousness.
Nowak thinks another kind of mystery is manifested in mathematics: "the great theorems of mathematics are statements of an eternal truth that comes from another world, a world that seems to be entirely independent of the particular trajectory that biological evolution has taken on earth." We must wonder how "evolution has led to a human brain that can gain access to a Platonic world of forms and ideas."
The conclusion I draw from all these essays is that an evolutionary explanation of human nature requires a combination of all the traditional intellectual disciplines--in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--as we strive for a Darwinian liberal education in pondering the deepest questions of human existence.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (5): Dante
The evolution of Heaven and Hell illustrates that one dimension of evolution that is uniquely human--symbolic evolution.
As I have indicated in a previous post, I agree with Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb that the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system--by which learned traditions of behavior are passed from one generation to another. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three forms of evolutionary inheritance, but also symbolic inheritance.
Symbolism is distinctively human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions far beyond our concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution.
Dante's Divine Comedy is the supreme literary moment in the symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell--and of Purgatory, by the way! He inherited 2,000 years of oral, visual, and written symbolism of the afterlife. He appropriated and transformed that inheritance by passing it through his individual experience and judgment and then passed it on to future generations. He thus introduced variations into the imagery of the afterlife that would compete in the evolutionary battle of symbols that constitute the spiritual history of humanity. His success depended upon his astute artistic judgment as to what kind of symbolism could survive and reproduce itself in the mental space of human intellectual and emotional responses, as constrained by the capacities and propensities of the human brain and nervous system as modulated by the behavioral and symbolic history of human culture over the past 50,000 years.
An evolutionary explanation of The Divine Comedy must move through at least three levels of evolutionary history--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of Dante's world, and the individual history of Dante's life. His writing would be unintelligible and uninteresting if it were not responsive to our universal human nature--our natural desires and inclinations. And because of that appeal to human nature, a book like The Divine Comedy will resonate with human readers for as long as human beings have natural desires that are satisfied by the symbolism of an afterlife. But within the broad constraints of human nature, Dante's work was also constrained by the cultural history of Christendom and of Dante's Italy. And yet, natural history and cultural history constrained but did not determine exactly what would emerge from the individual history of Dante's unique mind.
NATURAL HISTORY
From the beginning of Dante's Inferno, we see what he calls the principle of contrapasso--"counter-penalty" or "retaliation" (28.142). The punishment fits the crime as appropriate retribution. Dante learned this principle from Thomas Aquinas who defined contrapassum as "equal passion repaid for a previous action; and the expression applied most properly to injurious passions and actions, whereby a man harms the person of his neighbor; for instance, if a man strike, that he be struck back" (ST, II-II, q. 61, a. 4). He also learned this from Aristotle who identified antipeponthos--"reciprocity"--as a fundamental principle of justice (NE, 1132b21-23). He also learned this from the Bible's teaching "an eye for an eye" and "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6
Of course, Dante didn't need to learn this principle from reading Aquinas or Aristotle or the Bible, because he could have learned it from his own natural experience. Indeed, all human beings--even those who have never read Dante, Aquinas, Aristotle, or the Bible--understand the principle of reciprocity, because there is a natural human desire to respond in kind--returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. That's why I have identified the desire for justice as reciprocity as one of the twenty natural desires that belong to our evolved human nature.
The symbolic world of an afterlife might seem so far beyond our natural human experience that a skillful artist like Dante would have a completely free hand in designing that world in any way he pleases. That's not true, because the evolutionary success of an artist in constructing a symbolic world depends on his satisfying the natural desires of his human audience. We naturally want people to be rewarded appropriately for their virtues and punished appropriately for their vices. The ideas of Heaven and Hell have evolved in response to those natural human expectations, and so we will judge the plausibility of those ideas by how well they fit our expectations for fair reciprocity of rewards and punishments.
Much of the power of Dante's art in describing the afterlife comes from his skill in depicting appropriate punishments and rewards. For example, he presents the second circle of Hell as reserved for those being punished for the sin of lust. Although lust is one of the seven deadly sins, Dante ranks it as one of the least of the mortal sins. The more serious sins--violence, fraud, and treachery--are punished in the deeper circles of Hell.
In the second circle, the punishment of the sin of lust conveys the passionate power that drives the lustful by having the lovers blown about incessantly by a hurricane:
"I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.
"The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.
"When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
"I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.
"And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
"There is no hope that ever comforts them--
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain" (V.28-45).
Here the punishment fits the crime, because the lustful reenact the restless obsessiveness of their lust eternally. The natural punishment for a vice is to be driven forever by one's vicious activity.
Nevertheless, Dante feels compassion for these lovers, particularly, Francesca and Paolo. Francesca had been unhappily married to Giancotto, and she had fallen in love with his handsome brother, Paolo. When Giancotto discovered their adulterous love, he murdered both of them. Francesco tells Dante how she fell into sin. She and Paolo were reading a romantic story about how Lancelot fell into an illicit love for Guinevere. When they read how Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time, Francesca relates, "this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth," and "that day we read no more." As Francesca finishes telling her story, Paolo weeps, and then Dante faints with pity.
We the readers are made by Dante to feel the sweet power of romantic lust, and so we also feel Dante's pity for these lovers, which persuades us to agree with Dante's judgment that their sin is lighter than the sins punished deeper in Hell. But we also know that adultery is so disruptive to social life that it deserves some punishment.
Some scholars have argued that romantic love is not a universal natural desire but a cultural invention of the medieval courtly love tradition. If so, then those readers who have not been shaped by that cultural tradition might not share Dante's sympathy for these doomed lovers. But if romantic love is a natural desire of our evolved human nature--as I believe it is--then Dante's depiction of the temptations of this passion should evoke some agreement from most readers universally.
Even readers who don't believe in the reality of an afterlife with Heaven and Hell can be moved by, and learn from, Dante's Divine Comedy because its poetic symbolism illuminates natural human experience.
CULTURAL HISTORY
But within the limits set by our universal human nature, there is room for cultural variation. And so conceptions of the afterlife will express both the natural universality and the cultural variability of our experience. Although our 20 natural desires are universal, different cultural traditions will rank and organize those natural desires in different ways, and this will be manifested in views of the afterlife.
For example, the cultural history of medieval Christendom had shaped a view of the afterlife in which the supreme good of religious understanding was to be recognized by being placed at the peak of heavenly rewards. All other goods were to be ranked as inferior to this dominant good. The goods of the body were inferior to the goods of the mind. The goods of the political life were inferior to the goods of the contemplative life. And of the goods of the mind, philosophic or scientific understanding was inferior to the religious understanding that would come from the eternal contemplation of the Christian God.
Moreover, the traditional Christian doctrines of original sin and predestination dictated that all human beings were condemned to eternal punishment, and that those few who attained eternal salvation did so only by the unmerited grace of God through the atonement of Christ. Therefore, all those outside the tradition of Christian revelation were to be condemned forever.
Dante's Divine Comedy is constrained by this Christian cultural history, which provides him the symbolic material for his poetic art. But even so, if he is crafty enough, he can exercise his individual judgment in altering and even criticizing that cultural tradition. And, certainly, the individual readers of his poetry, including many who might be skeptical of Christian culture, can engage in a critical assessment of the Christian afterlife and Dante's representation of that afterlife, which contributes to the continuing symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell.
For instance, one might question the assumption of eternal punishments in Hell. Why do they have to be eternal? Even if Francesca and Paolo deserve punishment for their adulterous lust, do they deserve it for eternity? Doesn't it seem unfair and unreasonable that God would never give them a chance to repent of their momentary yielding to the seductive sweetness of romantic love? If so, then why not agree with Origen that the punishment of Hell is to have a purging effect, so that eventually all those in Hell can feel the pangs of conscience and then ask for, and receive, forgiveness? After all, doesn't the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory concede Origen's arguments for sinners being able to undergo purgation and thus open themselves to the love and forgiveness of God?
Dante's answer seems to be drawn from Aristotle's account of how habituation shapes character. If we choose often to engage in vicious behavior, then eventually we become habituated to it, it becomes our enduring character, and then it's hard, maybe impossible, to turn away from our vicious path. In much of the Divine Comedy, Dante seems to endorse the traditional Christian view that sin is so obsessive that at death the sinful will is unchangeable.
But how is this consistent with the idea of depravity as original sin? If we are so depraved that we have no choice but to sin, how is it just to punish us eternally? Aristotle thinks we have some choice in the matter, and therefore we can be held responsible for our choices. But if we are responsible for our conduct, why can't we choose to change, to reform, to turn back?
Is the idea of total depravity even intelligible? If we were totally depraved, how would we be able to recognize depravity as depravity? If we were totally depraved, how could be make the judgments of better and worse ways of acting that are reflected in the gradations of vicious and virtuous conduct in the Divine Comedy?
Such questions illustrate the freedom we have to criticize the cultural history of the afterlife.
INDIVIDUAL HISTORY
Within the limits set by his Christian culture, Dante had some freedom to exercise his individual judgment about how to depict the afterlife. He was able to use the Divine Comedy to criticize the Catholic Church in ways that prepared the way for the Protestant Reformation. He also implicitly endorsed a pre-Christian or pagan conception of politics and philosophy that some readers have seen as suggesting a secret teaching at odds with Christian culture (see Inferno, 9.61-63; Purgatorio, 8.19-21; Paradiso, 2.1-9, 13.121-23, 23.64-69).
Dante identifies himself with the "honorable men" and "great-hearted souls" in Limbo--pagan poets, politicians, scientists, and philosophers. At the center of the list of people in Limbo are Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. He even includes three Muslims--Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes. These people "did not sin," but since they "lived before Christianity" or "did not worship God in fitting ways," they cannot enter Heaven, but neither are they in the depths of Hell (Inferno, V).
As Dante finally ascends to the tenth heaven, the Empyrean, which is the highest realm of spiritual reality, the seat of imperial sovereignty is reserved for Henry VII, the Emperor, whom Dante had hoped would restore the Roman Empire. And it is prophesied that Henry's opponent--Pope Clement V--will be eternally condemned for simony (Paradiso, XXX).
As John Casey correctly notes, Dante depicts at the end of the Paradiso the supreme happiness of the eternal contemplation of God, which is the beatific vision. Dante sees the eternal light of God. "Within its depths, I saw ingathered, bound by love into one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe" (XXXIII.85-87). Here then is the traditional idea of Christian culture that what human beings really want, what they most deeply desire, is to see God and thus to contemplate the whole order of things forever, which shows that a purely contemplative life is the only true good for human beings.
But what Casey does not notice is that even as Dante appears to endorse this, his placement of the Emperor Henry on a seat in the highest heaven suggests that political life is part of the supreme good, perhaps also suggesting that the contemplative life (whether religious or philosophic) cannot be separated from the political life, because human beings are political animals as well as rational animals.
Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, and here.
As I have indicated in a previous post, I agree with Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb that the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system--by which learned traditions of behavior are passed from one generation to another. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three forms of evolutionary inheritance, but also symbolic inheritance.
Symbolism is distinctively human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions far beyond our concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution.
Dante's Divine Comedy is the supreme literary moment in the symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell--and of Purgatory, by the way! He inherited 2,000 years of oral, visual, and written symbolism of the afterlife. He appropriated and transformed that inheritance by passing it through his individual experience and judgment and then passed it on to future generations. He thus introduced variations into the imagery of the afterlife that would compete in the evolutionary battle of symbols that constitute the spiritual history of humanity. His success depended upon his astute artistic judgment as to what kind of symbolism could survive and reproduce itself in the mental space of human intellectual and emotional responses, as constrained by the capacities and propensities of the human brain and nervous system as modulated by the behavioral and symbolic history of human culture over the past 50,000 years.
An evolutionary explanation of The Divine Comedy must move through at least three levels of evolutionary history--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of Dante's world, and the individual history of Dante's life. His writing would be unintelligible and uninteresting if it were not responsive to our universal human nature--our natural desires and inclinations. And because of that appeal to human nature, a book like The Divine Comedy will resonate with human readers for as long as human beings have natural desires that are satisfied by the symbolism of an afterlife. But within the broad constraints of human nature, Dante's work was also constrained by the cultural history of Christendom and of Dante's Italy. And yet, natural history and cultural history constrained but did not determine exactly what would emerge from the individual history of Dante's unique mind.
NATURAL HISTORY
From the beginning of Dante's Inferno, we see what he calls the principle of contrapasso--"counter-penalty" or "retaliation" (28.142). The punishment fits the crime as appropriate retribution. Dante learned this principle from Thomas Aquinas who defined contrapassum as "equal passion repaid for a previous action; and the expression applied most properly to injurious passions and actions, whereby a man harms the person of his neighbor; for instance, if a man strike, that he be struck back" (ST, II-II, q. 61, a. 4). He also learned this from Aristotle who identified antipeponthos--"reciprocity"--as a fundamental principle of justice (NE, 1132b21-23). He also learned this from the Bible's teaching "an eye for an eye" and "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6
Of course, Dante didn't need to learn this principle from reading Aquinas or Aristotle or the Bible, because he could have learned it from his own natural experience. Indeed, all human beings--even those who have never read Dante, Aquinas, Aristotle, or the Bible--understand the principle of reciprocity, because there is a natural human desire to respond in kind--returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. That's why I have identified the desire for justice as reciprocity as one of the twenty natural desires that belong to our evolved human nature.
The symbolic world of an afterlife might seem so far beyond our natural human experience that a skillful artist like Dante would have a completely free hand in designing that world in any way he pleases. That's not true, because the evolutionary success of an artist in constructing a symbolic world depends on his satisfying the natural desires of his human audience. We naturally want people to be rewarded appropriately for their virtues and punished appropriately for their vices. The ideas of Heaven and Hell have evolved in response to those natural human expectations, and so we will judge the plausibility of those ideas by how well they fit our expectations for fair reciprocity of rewards and punishments.
Much of the power of Dante's art in describing the afterlife comes from his skill in depicting appropriate punishments and rewards. For example, he presents the second circle of Hell as reserved for those being punished for the sin of lust. Although lust is one of the seven deadly sins, Dante ranks it as one of the least of the mortal sins. The more serious sins--violence, fraud, and treachery--are punished in the deeper circles of Hell.
In the second circle, the punishment of the sin of lust conveys the passionate power that drives the lustful by having the lovers blown about incessantly by a hurricane:
"I reached a place where every light is muted,
which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest,
when it is battered by opposing winds.
"The hellish hurricane, which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence:
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them.
"When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
"I learned that those who undergo this torment
are damned because they sinned within the flesh,
subjecting reason to the rule of lust.
"And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks,
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:
now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
"There is no hope that ever comforts them--
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain" (V.28-45).
Here the punishment fits the crime, because the lustful reenact the restless obsessiveness of their lust eternally. The natural punishment for a vice is to be driven forever by one's vicious activity.
Nevertheless, Dante feels compassion for these lovers, particularly, Francesca and Paolo. Francesca had been unhappily married to Giancotto, and she had fallen in love with his handsome brother, Paolo. When Giancotto discovered their adulterous love, he murdered both of them. Francesco tells Dante how she fell into sin. She and Paolo were reading a romantic story about how Lancelot fell into an illicit love for Guinevere. When they read how Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time, Francesca relates, "this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth," and "that day we read no more." As Francesca finishes telling her story, Paolo weeps, and then Dante faints with pity.
We the readers are made by Dante to feel the sweet power of romantic lust, and so we also feel Dante's pity for these lovers, which persuades us to agree with Dante's judgment that their sin is lighter than the sins punished deeper in Hell. But we also know that adultery is so disruptive to social life that it deserves some punishment.
Some scholars have argued that romantic love is not a universal natural desire but a cultural invention of the medieval courtly love tradition. If so, then those readers who have not been shaped by that cultural tradition might not share Dante's sympathy for these doomed lovers. But if romantic love is a natural desire of our evolved human nature--as I believe it is--then Dante's depiction of the temptations of this passion should evoke some agreement from most readers universally.
Even readers who don't believe in the reality of an afterlife with Heaven and Hell can be moved by, and learn from, Dante's Divine Comedy because its poetic symbolism illuminates natural human experience.
CULTURAL HISTORY
But within the limits set by our universal human nature, there is room for cultural variation. And so conceptions of the afterlife will express both the natural universality and the cultural variability of our experience. Although our 20 natural desires are universal, different cultural traditions will rank and organize those natural desires in different ways, and this will be manifested in views of the afterlife.
For example, the cultural history of medieval Christendom had shaped a view of the afterlife in which the supreme good of religious understanding was to be recognized by being placed at the peak of heavenly rewards. All other goods were to be ranked as inferior to this dominant good. The goods of the body were inferior to the goods of the mind. The goods of the political life were inferior to the goods of the contemplative life. And of the goods of the mind, philosophic or scientific understanding was inferior to the religious understanding that would come from the eternal contemplation of the Christian God.
Moreover, the traditional Christian doctrines of original sin and predestination dictated that all human beings were condemned to eternal punishment, and that those few who attained eternal salvation did so only by the unmerited grace of God through the atonement of Christ. Therefore, all those outside the tradition of Christian revelation were to be condemned forever.
Dante's Divine Comedy is constrained by this Christian cultural history, which provides him the symbolic material for his poetic art. But even so, if he is crafty enough, he can exercise his individual judgment in altering and even criticizing that cultural tradition. And, certainly, the individual readers of his poetry, including many who might be skeptical of Christian culture, can engage in a critical assessment of the Christian afterlife and Dante's representation of that afterlife, which contributes to the continuing symbolic evolution of Heaven and Hell.
For instance, one might question the assumption of eternal punishments in Hell. Why do they have to be eternal? Even if Francesca and Paolo deserve punishment for their adulterous lust, do they deserve it for eternity? Doesn't it seem unfair and unreasonable that God would never give them a chance to repent of their momentary yielding to the seductive sweetness of romantic love? If so, then why not agree with Origen that the punishment of Hell is to have a purging effect, so that eventually all those in Hell can feel the pangs of conscience and then ask for, and receive, forgiveness? After all, doesn't the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory concede Origen's arguments for sinners being able to undergo purgation and thus open themselves to the love and forgiveness of God?
Dante's answer seems to be drawn from Aristotle's account of how habituation shapes character. If we choose often to engage in vicious behavior, then eventually we become habituated to it, it becomes our enduring character, and then it's hard, maybe impossible, to turn away from our vicious path. In much of the Divine Comedy, Dante seems to endorse the traditional Christian view that sin is so obsessive that at death the sinful will is unchangeable.
But how is this consistent with the idea of depravity as original sin? If we are so depraved that we have no choice but to sin, how is it just to punish us eternally? Aristotle thinks we have some choice in the matter, and therefore we can be held responsible for our choices. But if we are responsible for our conduct, why can't we choose to change, to reform, to turn back?
Is the idea of total depravity even intelligible? If we were totally depraved, how would we be able to recognize depravity as depravity? If we were totally depraved, how could be make the judgments of better and worse ways of acting that are reflected in the gradations of vicious and virtuous conduct in the Divine Comedy?
Such questions illustrate the freedom we have to criticize the cultural history of the afterlife.
INDIVIDUAL HISTORY
Within the limits set by his Christian culture, Dante had some freedom to exercise his individual judgment about how to depict the afterlife. He was able to use the Divine Comedy to criticize the Catholic Church in ways that prepared the way for the Protestant Reformation. He also implicitly endorsed a pre-Christian or pagan conception of politics and philosophy that some readers have seen as suggesting a secret teaching at odds with Christian culture (see Inferno, 9.61-63; Purgatorio, 8.19-21; Paradiso, 2.1-9, 13.121-23, 23.64-69).
Dante identifies himself with the "honorable men" and "great-hearted souls" in Limbo--pagan poets, politicians, scientists, and philosophers. At the center of the list of people in Limbo are Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. He even includes three Muslims--Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes. These people "did not sin," but since they "lived before Christianity" or "did not worship God in fitting ways," they cannot enter Heaven, but neither are they in the depths of Hell (Inferno, V).
As Dante finally ascends to the tenth heaven, the Empyrean, which is the highest realm of spiritual reality, the seat of imperial sovereignty is reserved for Henry VII, the Emperor, whom Dante had hoped would restore the Roman Empire. And it is prophesied that Henry's opponent--Pope Clement V--will be eternally condemned for simony (Paradiso, XXX).
As John Casey correctly notes, Dante depicts at the end of the Paradiso the supreme happiness of the eternal contemplation of God, which is the beatific vision. Dante sees the eternal light of God. "Within its depths, I saw ingathered, bound by love into one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe" (XXXIII.85-87). Here then is the traditional idea of Christian culture that what human beings really want, what they most deeply desire, is to see God and thus to contemplate the whole order of things forever, which shows that a purely contemplative life is the only true good for human beings.
But what Casey does not notice is that even as Dante appears to endorse this, his placement of the Emperor Henry on a seat in the highest heaven suggests that political life is part of the supreme good, perhaps also suggesting that the contemplative life (whether religious or philosophic) cannot be separated from the political life, because human beings are political animals as well as rational animals.
Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, and here.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Lockean Liberalism as Symbolic Niche Construction: Locke's Mixed Modes, Searle's Institutional Facts, and McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues
If we accept the modern scientific explanation of the natural world, how can we explain the human mind and human society? This is the fundamental question of modern intellectual life.
There are at least three ways to answer this question. One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science. Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society. A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices.
According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature. According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences. According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.
As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best. There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution. According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics. According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.
There are at least three ways to answer this question. One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science. Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society. A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices.
According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature. According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences. According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.
As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best. There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution. According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics. According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.
So, for example, biology must be consistent with physics and chemistry, but biological phenomena have an emergent complexity that cannot be fully reduced to physics and chemistry. The mind and society are also emergent phenomena that must be compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, but without being fully reducible to those physical and chemical laws. Some of my posts elaborating these points can be found here, here, here, and here.
My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010). Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.
I mostly agree with Searle about all of this. My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics. If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.
We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality. Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill. Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services. As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it. But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange. Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States. It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such. Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)
Similarly, Barack Obama is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures of the United States Constitution. I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States. I own a house, a car, and other property. I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country. Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.
The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions. The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.
To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism. Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality. Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.
Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions. But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities. (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)
So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males. But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.
Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality. "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty. In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles. As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles. Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species. Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.
This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract. But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning. Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.
Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists. He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society. "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature." His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62). Both of these claims are mistaken.
Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature." There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).
My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010). Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.
"How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits--as mindful, rational, speech-act performing, free-will having, social, political human beings--in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless, physical particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts?" (ix)Like me, Searle assumes that we live in one world--that we live in one reality with physical, mental, and social aspects--and that our explanations of mental and social life must be compatible with the physical sciences but not simply reducible to those sciences. And so, for example, in Making the Social World, he offers an explanation of social reality as created and maintained by language, while explaining language as a natural product of the human biological evolution of the brain that enabled the human mind to create social institutions through what he calls "collective intentionality."
I mostly agree with Searle about all of this. My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics. If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.
We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality. Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill. Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services. As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it. But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange. Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States. It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such. Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)
Similarly, Barack Obama is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures of the United States Constitution. I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States. I own a house, a car, and other property. I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country. Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.
The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions. The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.
To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism. Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality. Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.
Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions. But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities. (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)
So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males. But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.
Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality. "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty. In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles. As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles. Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species. Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.
This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract. But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning. Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.
Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists. He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society. "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature." His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62). Both of these claims are mistaken.
Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature." There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).
This was the first human society that was created by informal consent--collective recognition or acceptance--through language, and language itself was a social creation in which certain sounds were given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" (ECHU, III.2.8). But this society was not a political society, because there was not yet any consent to a formal government or legal system (First Treatise, pars. 86-93; Second Treatise, pars. 6-14, 25-35, 77-90). Searle is mistaken, therefore, in assuming that Locke thought there were no human institutions in the state of nature.
Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society. In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5). Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).
According to Locke in the Essay, all our ideas originate in experience, either in experience of the external world, which we have through sensation, or in experience of our own thinking and wishing, which we have through reflection. We form our simple ideas in our minds directly from these experiences. We can then form complex ideas by combining and comparing simple ideas, and we can form general ideas by abstracting one idea from others with which it is associated. Thus, all human thought arises either as an impression from experience or as a modification of such impressions by some faculty of the mind.
Locke distinguishes the complex ideas of substances from complex ideas of modes and relations. Complex ideas of substances are combinations of simple ideas that represent particular things that exist by themselves, for example, man, sheep, army, and gold. Modes are complex ideas that do not contain any representation of anything existing by itself; rather, modes are ideas conceived as modifications of simple ideas. Simple modes are combinations of a single simple idea, for example, space and duration. Mixed modes combine several different simple ideas, for example, triangle, gratitude, obligation, and murder. Ideas of relations are a special kind of mixed mode that arises by comparing one idea with another, for example, father, whiter, cause and effect.
Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes. Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.
Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes. The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly." Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4).
This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist. Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!' Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity. We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!' 'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)
But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas. And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?
Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7). Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings. The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73). In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.
So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep. This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11). And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7). Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.
Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights. And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).
But while Seale sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God. He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183). And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions. In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe." But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).
Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56). He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73). And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.
Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society. In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5). Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).
According to Locke in the Essay, all our ideas originate in experience, either in experience of the external world, which we have through sensation, or in experience of our own thinking and wishing, which we have through reflection. We form our simple ideas in our minds directly from these experiences. We can then form complex ideas by combining and comparing simple ideas, and we can form general ideas by abstracting one idea from others with which it is associated. Thus, all human thought arises either as an impression from experience or as a modification of such impressions by some faculty of the mind.
Locke distinguishes the complex ideas of substances from complex ideas of modes and relations. Complex ideas of substances are combinations of simple ideas that represent particular things that exist by themselves, for example, man, sheep, army, and gold. Modes are complex ideas that do not contain any representation of anything existing by itself; rather, modes are ideas conceived as modifications of simple ideas. Simple modes are combinations of a single simple idea, for example, space and duration. Mixed modes combine several different simple ideas, for example, triangle, gratitude, obligation, and murder. Ideas of relations are a special kind of mixed mode that arises by comparing one idea with another, for example, father, whiter, cause and effect.
Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes. Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.
Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes. The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly." Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4).
This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist. Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!' Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity. We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!' 'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)
But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas. And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?
Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7). Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings. The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73). In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.
So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep. This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11). And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7). Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.
Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights. And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).
But while Seale sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God. He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183). And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions. In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe." But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).
Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56). He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73). And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.
But then when the Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," this suggests a natural creationism--that is, Nature's God creates through natural law, perhaps through a natural evolutionary process. And indeed many Christians are theistic evolutionists who see God working through natural evolution. Locke often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (Second Treatise, pars. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195).
Men might be created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights through the human evolution of a large and complex cerebral cortex that allows them to collectively recognize human equality of rights.
In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments. Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games. And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.
Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction. "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024) for an idea first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted. We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations. Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.
As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism. This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction. The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.
The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous. This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues." In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration: Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).
Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument. In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution. But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.
Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle: Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions? Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173).
Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power. This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).
Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II. Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason. While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradicted to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]). Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy. The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.
The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle. So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of reasoning from principles, but it was also a declaration of war. And if the Patriots had not won some decisive battles--such as the battle of Saratoga in October of 1777--they would have lost the war (Weddle 2021). This is part of the evolutionary history of humanity through group selection in war.
In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments. Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games. And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.
Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction. "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024) for an idea first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted. We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations. Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.
As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism. This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction. The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.
The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous. This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues." In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration: Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).
Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument. In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution. But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.
Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle: Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions? Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173).
Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power. This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).
Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II. Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason. While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradicted to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]). Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy. The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.
The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle. So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of reasoning from principles, but it was also a declaration of war. And if the Patriots had not won some decisive battles--such as the battle of Saratoga in October of 1777--they would have lost the war (Weddle 2021). This is part of the evolutionary history of humanity through group selection in war.
As Winston Churchill observed: "Battles are the
principal milestones in secular history.
Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often
treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and
diplomacy. But great battles, whether
won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of
values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must
conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times, University of Chicago Press [2002], II: 381).
Thursday, April 24, 2025
The Evolutionary Symbolic Niche Construction of Liberalism Through Lockean "Consent"
Locke's teaching that government arises from the consent of the people is well known. But it's not well known that Locke explains the emergence of all social institutions as created by popular consent. Human beings have created not only government (ST, 95-99) but also languages (ECHU, III.2.8), families (ST, 74-83), morality (ECHU, 28.10), and money (ST, 36) by consenting to their existence. This is what I have called the evolutionary symbolic niche construction of Lockean liberalism. Of course, Locke does not use this terminology, but it's the best way to explain what he means in claiming that human beings create social institutions by consenting to them.
We should start by seeing that Locke was answering the fundamental question of modern intellectual life.
HOW MANY WORLDS ARE THERE?
If we accept the modern scientific explanation of the natural world as it arose in the seventeenth century, how can we explain the human mind and human society?
There are at least three ways to answer this question. One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science. Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society. A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices.
According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature. According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences. According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.
As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best. There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution. According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics. According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.
So, for example, biology must be consistent with physics and chemistry, but biological phenomena have an emergent complexity that cannot be fully reduced to physics and chemistry. The mind and society are also emergent phenomena that must be compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, but without being fully reducible to those physical and chemical laws. Some of my posts elaborating these points can be found here, here, here, and here.
My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010). Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.
I mostly agree with Searle about all of this. My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics. If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.
We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality. Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill. Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services. As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it. But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange. Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States. It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such. Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)
My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010). Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.
"How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits--as mindful, rational, speech-act performing, free-will having, social, political human beings--in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless, physical particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts?" (ix)Like me, Searle assumes that we live in one world--that we live in one reality with physical, mental, and social aspects--and that our explanations of mental and social life must be compatible with the physical sciences but not simply reducible to those sciences. And so, for example, in Making the Social World, he offers an explanation of social reality as created and maintained by language, while explaining language as a natural product of the human biological evolution of the brain that enabled the human mind to create social institutions through what he calls "collective intentionality."
I mostly agree with Searle about all of this. My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics. If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.
We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality. Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill. Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services. As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it. But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange. Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States. It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such. Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)
Similarly, Donald Trump is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures for the Electoral College and who satisfies the qualifications prescribed in the United States Constitution.
I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States. I own a house, a car, and other property. I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country. Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.
The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions. The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.
To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism. Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality. Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.
Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions. But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities. (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)
So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males. But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.
Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality. "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty. In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles. As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles. Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species. Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.
This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract. But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning. Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.
Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists. He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society. "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature." His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62). Both of these claims are mistaken.
Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature." There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).
The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions. The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.
To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism. Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality. Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.
Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions. But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities. (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)
So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males. But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.
Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality. "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty. In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles. As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles. Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species. Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.
This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract. But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning. Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.
Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists. He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society. "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature." His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62). Both of these claims are mistaken.
Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature." There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).
This was the first human society that was created by informal consent--collective recognition or acceptance--through language, and language itself was a social creation in which certain sounds were given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" (ECHU, III.2.8). But this society was not a political society, because there was not yet any consent to a formal government or legal system (First Treatise, pars. 86-93; Second Treatise, pars. 6-14, 25-35, 77-90). Searle is mistaken, therefore, in assuming that Locke thought there were no human institutions in the state of nature.
Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society. In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5). Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).
Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society. In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5). Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).
Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes. Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.
Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes. The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly." Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4).
This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist. Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!' Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity. We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!' 'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)
But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas. And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?
Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7). Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings. The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73). In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.
So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep. This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11). And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7). Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.
Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights. And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).
But while Searle sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God. He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183). And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions. In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe." But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).
Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56). He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73). And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.
Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes. The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly." Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4).
This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist. Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!' Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity. We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!' 'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)
But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas. And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?
Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7). Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings. The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73). In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.
So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep. This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11). And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7). Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.
Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights. And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).
But while Searle sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God. He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183). And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions. In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe." But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).
Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56). He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73). And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.
But then when the Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," this suggests a natural creationism--that is, Nature's God creates through natural law, perhaps through a natural evolutionary process. And indeed many Christians are theistic evolutionists who see God working through natural evolution. Locke often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (Second Treatise, pars. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195).
Men might be created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights through the human evolution of a large and complex cerebral cortex that allows them to collectively recognize human equality of rights.
In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments. Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games. And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.
Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction. "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory that refers to plants and animals constructing the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted. For example, beavers alter their environment by building dams, and beavers have adapted this constructed environment (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024)
In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments. Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games. And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.
Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction. "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory that refers to plants and animals constructing the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted. For example, beavers alter their environment by building dams, and beavers have adapted this constructed environment (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024)
This idea was first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.
We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations. Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.
As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism. This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction. The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.
The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous. This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues." In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration: Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).
Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument. In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution. But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.
Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle: Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions? Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173).
Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power. This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).
Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II. Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason. While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradited to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]). Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy. The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.
The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle.
As Winston Churchill observed, "Great battles, whether won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times).
As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism. This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction. The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.
The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous. This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues." In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration: Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).
Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument. In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution. But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.
Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle: Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions? Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173).
Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power. This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).
Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II. Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason. While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradited to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]). Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy. The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.
The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle.
As Winston Churchill observed, "Great battles, whether won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times).
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS LOCKEAN SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION
If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).
The Declaration of Independence is what Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." The American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C]. The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."
Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War. Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war. Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."
In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude." In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408). This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess). The "God of Armies" will decide.
The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance. This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021). If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence. As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.
The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence. Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.
THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW AS SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION
In writing new constitutions for governments at both the state and national levels, the Americans had to debate what kind of constitutional language would best secure their natural rights. Beginning with the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776, it was common for the state constitutions to have a list of rights that must be protected. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 did not have a bill of rights, but many of the state ratifying conventions recommended amendments that would provide a bill of rights. In the First Congress of 1789, James Madison and others proposed such amendments, which were ratified in 1791, and these first ten amendments became known as the Bill of Rights. Here then is another example of symbolic niche construction through a declaration of status function: the American people agreed to recognize the first ten amendments as a statement of human rights in America as secured by constitutional law.
One of those stipulated rights is due process of law as stated in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." A similar provision became part of the Fourteenth Amendment: ". . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
But as I have indicated in some recent posts, Trump has recently claimed that as President he has the power to suspend the right to due process of law--particularly, in his deportation of immigrants who have been sent to a prison in El Salvador. Trump's argument is that this cannot be an absolute right for all persons in the United States, because in time of emergency, the President must have the power to remove people from the United States without due process of life if he identifies them as dangerous threats to America.
Trump has appealed to the Alien Enemies Act as giving him this power to protect America from "invasions," and he claims that illegal immigrants constitute an "invasion" of the U.S. The Courts, however, have said that as used in the Alien Enemies Act, "invasions" clearly means military invasions. And since Venezuela has not invaded the U.S. militarily, Trump cannot deport Venezuelans without due process of law.
There are reports that Trump is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would be another way to suspend the right of due process of law. He could cite the Constitution's provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ at the beginning of the Civil War, claiming that the Confederacy was clearly in a "rebellion" against the United States, and the public safety required that his commanders in the field needed to suspend the writ to arrest and detain people suspected of being spies or saboteurs for the Confederacy.
Trump would have to convince the courts and the American people that the many illegal immigrants in the U.S. count as an "invasion," which makes it necessary for the President to suspend the writ to protect the public safety of Americans threatened by the criminal violence of illegal immigrants.
Trump could also claim that he was exercising what John Locke identified as executive prerogative--the power of the executive "to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it," which could include suspending individual rights in time of emergency (ST, 160).
This is an illustration of how Americans often have to debate the meaning of their symbolic niche construction of individual rights. If Americans have agreed to the establishment of due process of law as an individual right, must they agree that this is an absolute right never to be infringed? Or are their circumstances--perhaps a national emergency of some sort--in which the public good would require suspending that right? But if so, what counts as a true emergency in which the public good would require allowing the President to exercise dictatorial power in denying individuals the natural rights that we usually want to protect?
The courts and the American people will have to decide.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
The Biology of Animal Culture Supports Aristotle Against Hobbes
One of the big debates in the history of political philosophy is over the question of whether human beings are political animals by nature comparable to other political animals. Aristotle said yes, because he thought human beings could be rightly compared with other political animals such as ants, bees, wasps, and cranes. Hobbes said no, because he thought that while the social insects were instinctively inclined to cooperate for the good of their colony, human political cooperation was learned rather than instinctive, and it had to overcome the natural human tendency to conflict. Twenty years ago, I argued that modern biological research supported Aristotle's position (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998). The research over the past twenty years provides even more evidence for my argument.
This dispute between Aristotle and Hobbes has been critical for the history of political science. Most modern political scientists have followed Hobbes in assuming an anthropocentric view of political science, with no comparative study of nonhuman political animals. In recent years, a few political scientists have revived Aristotle's conception of a biopolitical science as a comparative science that studies all political animals, with human beings understood as the most political animals because of their political use of language or symbolism (logos).
Against Aristotle, Hobbes contended, in both De Cive (chap. 5, par. 5) and the Leviathan (chap. 17), that there were six differences between social animals (like bees and ants) and human beings. (1) Unlike social animals, human beings compete for honor and prestige. (2) Among social animals, there is no conflict between the private good and the common good, as there is among human beings, because the natural appetites of the social animals incline them as individuals to do what is good for all. (3) Social animals lack reason, which human beings use to criticize the administration of common business and thus create civil conflict. (4) Social animals lack the art of words, which human beings use to argue about what is good and evil and thus fall into sedition and war. (5) Social animals do not distinguish between injury (breach of covenant) and damage; and therefore, unlike human beings, they are not offended with one another as along as their physical appetites are satisfied. In these five respects, uniquely human attributes create social conflicts not found among the social animals. A sixth difference between human beings and social animals, according to Hobbes, follows as a consequence of the other five. (6) "Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant and lasting; which is a common power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit" (Leviathan, chap. 17).
Hobbes's six arguments presuppose two fundamental premises (compare De Homine, chap. 10). First, among the naturally social animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition. Second, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity. The research done today by Darwinian biologists studying the social behavior of animals denies both premises.
Consider the second premise--the contrast between natural instinct and social learning and the claim that only among human beings does social order depend on social learning. Aristotle thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning. Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this. Among insects, individual learning affects feeding, predator avoidance, social interactions, and sexual behavior (Dukas 2010). Most insects are solitary, and they show little social learning, except in a few cases such as offspring learning food preferences from their parents.
Social learning is more extensive among social insects, and particularly among the social bees, ants, and wasps (hymenoptera) (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007). Thus, Aristotle was correct to identify these social insects as political animals. Today, the most celebrated example of social learning among honeybees is their waggle dance. Aristotle observed this behavior, and he inferred that it must be some form of social communication. But it was not until the early 1960s that Karl von Frisch decoded the language of the waggle dance (von Frisch 1967).
Foraging bees who have found new flower patches return to their nest to recruit their nest mates. Inside the hive, the forager moves upward while waggling her body from side to side and vibrating her wings. At the end of each dance, she circles back to the starting point, alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise turns, so that she moves in a figure eight pattern. The angle of the waggle run relative to the upward direction gives the angle of the flower patch relative to the Sun's position in the sky. The duration of the dance run is positively correlated to the distance of the flower patch from the hive. The overall number of waggle runs is positively correlated with the quality of the food in the flower patch.
The same waggle dance is used when honeybees need to decide where to go for a new nest site. Scouts that have examined a site return to the nest to recruit others to visit the site. The waggle dance conveys the location and the quality of the potential site. Different scouts represent different sites. The better sites recruit more bees to dance for them than the sites of lesser quality. Eventually, over a period of days, a consensus develops for one site, and the colony moves there. This is what Tom Seeley calls "honeybee democracy" (Seeley 2010).
It's not clear whether social learning among social insects can create behavioral traditions. There is some evidence that bees can be trained to forage at certain times of the day, and that once learned, this daily pattern of a colony can be passed down to the next generation of bees (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).
By contrast to the skimpy evidence for behavioral traditions among social insects, the evidence for socially learned traditions among vertebrates, and particularly chimpanzees, is impressive. In a famous survey of seven chimp study sites in Africa, it was shown that there were 39 behavior patterns customary in some communities but absent in others, so that each chimp community has its distinctive profile of behavioral patterns, which looks a lot like the cultural diversity of human communities (Whiten et al. 1999). (As indicated in a previous post, using tools for cracking nuts is one example of a behavioral tradition found in some chimp communities but not others.)
The problem, however, is deciding whether the social learning of behavioral traditions should be identified as "culture," comparable to human culture. In some previous posts from a few years ago, I have indicated that I have been leaning towards the position of those like Eva Jablonka and Kim Hill (2010), who argue that while the social learning of behavioral traditions is a building block of culture, it is not sufficient, and that human culture is uniquely human insofar as it arises from language and symbolism that can create moral norms supported by moral emotions.
This seems to be Aristotle's position. On the one hand, some nonhuman animals are political in that they can organize their collective lives through the social learning of behavioral traditions. On the other hand, human beings are more political than these other political animals, because human beings have a capacity for conceptual abstraction and language (logos) that they can use to formulate and communicate communal standards for the just and the good. On this point, Hobbes seems to agree with Aristotle about the uniqueness of human language in allowing human beings to argue about good and evil.
Hill argues that while chimps can have the social regularities of behavioral traditions--such as subordinates deferring to alpha males--only human beings can use symbolic thought and language to create socially recognized norms of good behavior enforced by third-party punishment--such as recognizing that some leaders have the right to rule.
Oddly enough, Hill indicates, the only nonhuman animals that seem to show the third-party enforcement of social norms are honeybees and ants that have individuals who act as "police" in punishing cheaters (Liebig, Peters, and Holldobler 1999; Ratnicks and Wenseleers 2005; Smith, Holldobler & Liebig 2009).
Moreover, the honeybees' waggle dance does seem to be an abstract form of communication that looks like a kind of language. And yet even this dance language refers to observable realities in the world, and it does not allow bees to conceptualize and agree upon imaginary mental constructions.
REFERENCES
Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.
Arnhart. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals." American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.
Arnhart. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dukas, R. 2010. "Insect Social Learning." In Michael D. Breed and Janice Moore, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, 3 vols., 2:176-179.
Hill, Kim. 2010. "Experimental Studies of Animal Social Learning in the Wild: Trying to Untangle the Mystery of Human Culture." Learning & Behavior 38:319-328.
Leadbeater, Ellouise, and Lars Chittka. 2007. "Social Learning in Insects--From Miniature Brains to Consensus Building." Current Biology 17:R703-R713.
Liebig, J., C. Peeters, and B. Holldobler. 1999. "Worker Policing Limits the Number of Reproductives in a Ponerine Ant." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 266:1865-1870.
Ratnicks, Francis, and Thomas Wenseleers. 2005. "Policing Insect Societies." Science 307:54-56.
Seeley, Thomas. 2010. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smith, A. A., B. Holldobler, J. Liebig. 2009. "Cuticular Hydrocarbons Reliably Identify Cheaters and Allow Enforcement of Altruism in a Social Insect." Current Biology 19:78-81.
von Frisch, Karl. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Whiten, A., et al. 1999. "Cultures in Chimpanzees." Nature 399:682-685.
Some of my previous posts on these topics can be found here, here, here., here, and here.
This dispute between Aristotle and Hobbes has been critical for the history of political science. Most modern political scientists have followed Hobbes in assuming an anthropocentric view of political science, with no comparative study of nonhuman political animals. In recent years, a few political scientists have revived Aristotle's conception of a biopolitical science as a comparative science that studies all political animals, with human beings understood as the most political animals because of their political use of language or symbolism (logos).
Against Aristotle, Hobbes contended, in both De Cive (chap. 5, par. 5) and the Leviathan (chap. 17), that there were six differences between social animals (like bees and ants) and human beings. (1) Unlike social animals, human beings compete for honor and prestige. (2) Among social animals, there is no conflict between the private good and the common good, as there is among human beings, because the natural appetites of the social animals incline them as individuals to do what is good for all. (3) Social animals lack reason, which human beings use to criticize the administration of common business and thus create civil conflict. (4) Social animals lack the art of words, which human beings use to argue about what is good and evil and thus fall into sedition and war. (5) Social animals do not distinguish between injury (breach of covenant) and damage; and therefore, unlike human beings, they are not offended with one another as along as their physical appetites are satisfied. In these five respects, uniquely human attributes create social conflicts not found among the social animals. A sixth difference between human beings and social animals, according to Hobbes, follows as a consequence of the other five. (6) "Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant and lasting; which is a common power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit" (Leviathan, chap. 17).
Hobbes's six arguments presuppose two fundamental premises (compare De Homine, chap. 10). First, among the naturally social animals, social cooperation is completely harmonious because there are no conflicts of interest to create competition. Second, nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity. The research done today by Darwinian biologists studying the social behavior of animals denies both premises.
Consider the second premise--the contrast between natural instinct and social learning and the claim that only among human beings does social order depend on social learning. Aristotle thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning. Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this. Among insects, individual learning affects feeding, predator avoidance, social interactions, and sexual behavior (Dukas 2010). Most insects are solitary, and they show little social learning, except in a few cases such as offspring learning food preferences from their parents.
Social learning is more extensive among social insects, and particularly among the social bees, ants, and wasps (hymenoptera) (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007). Thus, Aristotle was correct to identify these social insects as political animals. Today, the most celebrated example of social learning among honeybees is their waggle dance. Aristotle observed this behavior, and he inferred that it must be some form of social communication. But it was not until the early 1960s that Karl von Frisch decoded the language of the waggle dance (von Frisch 1967).
Foraging bees who have found new flower patches return to their nest to recruit their nest mates. Inside the hive, the forager moves upward while waggling her body from side to side and vibrating her wings. At the end of each dance, she circles back to the starting point, alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise turns, so that she moves in a figure eight pattern. The angle of the waggle run relative to the upward direction gives the angle of the flower patch relative to the Sun's position in the sky. The duration of the dance run is positively correlated to the distance of the flower patch from the hive. The overall number of waggle runs is positively correlated with the quality of the food in the flower patch.
The same waggle dance is used when honeybees need to decide where to go for a new nest site. Scouts that have examined a site return to the nest to recruit others to visit the site. The waggle dance conveys the location and the quality of the potential site. Different scouts represent different sites. The better sites recruit more bees to dance for them than the sites of lesser quality. Eventually, over a period of days, a consensus develops for one site, and the colony moves there. This is what Tom Seeley calls "honeybee democracy" (Seeley 2010).
It's not clear whether social learning among social insects can create behavioral traditions. There is some evidence that bees can be trained to forage at certain times of the day, and that once learned, this daily pattern of a colony can be passed down to the next generation of bees (Leadbeater and Chittka 2007).
By contrast to the skimpy evidence for behavioral traditions among social insects, the evidence for socially learned traditions among vertebrates, and particularly chimpanzees, is impressive. In a famous survey of seven chimp study sites in Africa, it was shown that there were 39 behavior patterns customary in some communities but absent in others, so that each chimp community has its distinctive profile of behavioral patterns, which looks a lot like the cultural diversity of human communities (Whiten et al. 1999). (As indicated in a previous post, using tools for cracking nuts is one example of a behavioral tradition found in some chimp communities but not others.)
The problem, however, is deciding whether the social learning of behavioral traditions should be identified as "culture," comparable to human culture. In some previous posts from a few years ago, I have indicated that I have been leaning towards the position of those like Eva Jablonka and Kim Hill (2010), who argue that while the social learning of behavioral traditions is a building block of culture, it is not sufficient, and that human culture is uniquely human insofar as it arises from language and symbolism that can create moral norms supported by moral emotions.
This seems to be Aristotle's position. On the one hand, some nonhuman animals are political in that they can organize their collective lives through the social learning of behavioral traditions. On the other hand, human beings are more political than these other political animals, because human beings have a capacity for conceptual abstraction and language (logos) that they can use to formulate and communicate communal standards for the just and the good. On this point, Hobbes seems to agree with Aristotle about the uniqueness of human language in allowing human beings to argue about good and evil.
Hill argues that while chimps can have the social regularities of behavioral traditions--such as subordinates deferring to alpha males--only human beings can use symbolic thought and language to create socially recognized norms of good behavior enforced by third-party punishment--such as recognizing that some leaders have the right to rule.
Oddly enough, Hill indicates, the only nonhuman animals that seem to show the third-party enforcement of social norms are honeybees and ants that have individuals who act as "police" in punishing cheaters (Liebig, Peters, and Holldobler 1999; Ratnicks and Wenseleers 2005; Smith, Holldobler & Liebig 2009).
Moreover, the honeybees' waggle dance does seem to be an abstract form of communication that looks like a kind of language. And yet even this dance language refers to observable realities in the world, and it does not allow bees to conceptualize and agree upon imaginary mental constructions.
REFERENCES
Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.
Arnhart. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals." American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.
Arnhart. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dukas, R. 2010. "Insect Social Learning." In Michael D. Breed and Janice Moore, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, 3 vols., 2:176-179.
Hill, Kim. 2010. "Experimental Studies of Animal Social Learning in the Wild: Trying to Untangle the Mystery of Human Culture." Learning & Behavior 38:319-328.
Leadbeater, Ellouise, and Lars Chittka. 2007. "Social Learning in Insects--From Miniature Brains to Consensus Building." Current Biology 17:R703-R713.
Liebig, J., C. Peeters, and B. Holldobler. 1999. "Worker Policing Limits the Number of Reproductives in a Ponerine Ant." Proceedings of the Royal Society B 266:1865-1870.
Ratnicks, Francis, and Thomas Wenseleers. 2005. "Policing Insect Societies." Science 307:54-56.
Seeley, Thomas. 2010. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smith, A. A., B. Holldobler, J. Liebig. 2009. "Cuticular Hydrocarbons Reliably Identify Cheaters and Allow Enforcement of Altruism in a Social Insect." Current Biology 19:78-81.
von Frisch, Karl. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Whiten, A., et al. 1999. "Cultures in Chimpanzees." Nature 399:682-685.
Some of my previous posts on these topics can be found here, here, here., here, and here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)