Embracing variability and complexity and the explanatory reductionism of scientific realism

The epistemological reductionism of scientific realism

Any discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of scientific realism, as a metatheoretical framework, must first distinguish it from commonsense realism. As Overton (1994), among others, has elaborated, commonsense realism “accepts the material existence of a real, actual, or manifest world” whereas scientific realism “is an arguable philosophical doctrine about an ultimate or foundational ground of explanation” (p. 267). No reasonable person denies commonsense realism; as such, it grounds all scientific activity. Scientific realism, however, is another matter. We should also note that the version of scientific realism to which Arocha (2021) subscribes is less reductionist in orientation than many more traditional versions. Heavily indebted to Bunge’s (e.g., 1993, 2006) ontological treatments, Arocha’s scientific realism eschews physicalism and “vulgar” materialism (the traditional view of all matter as constituted by solid “things” with mass, extended in space). It instead embraces an emergentist materialism, which “makes room for supra-physical (though not aphysical) levels” of organization like organisms and social structures (Bunge, 2006, p. 74).

Nonetheless, any version of scientific realism still embarks on a reductionist epistemology by virtue of adhering to the basic ontological thesis common to all realist doctrines, namely that “the world is real and it exists independently of our knowledge of it” (see Arocha, 2021, p. 378). An outgrowth of this ontological thesis, as Bunge (2006) details, is the longstanding philosophical distinction between primary and secondary properties. Primary properties (such as shape, mass, motion, chemical compositions, etc.) are viewed as existing in objects, in things themselves, and are therefore independent of any and all subjects. In contrast, secondary properties (qualia such as color, phenomenal sensations of smell, taste, sound, etc.) are viewed as existing only in the relation between subject and object and are therefore dependent upon a subject—an individual—for their very existence. What counts as the ultimate or foundational ground of reality for scientific realists are “those things that exist independently of any subject” (p. 27). Therefore, primary properties assume explanatory privilege over secondary ones, with secondary properties as “skin deep,” “superficial” appearances relative to a more basic, underlying reality (pp. 81–82). This privileging promotes a reductionist epistemological approach whereby secondary properties require explanation in terms of primary properties for the explanation to count as properly scientific. Under these circumstances, phenomenological accounts of subjective experience, no matter how systematic and rigorous, hold no scientific value until “studied objectively as neurophysiological processes influenced by cultural traditions and social circumstances” (p. 76).

In a comparable vein, scientific realism promotes epistemological reductionism by upholding traditional Baconian and Galilean injunctions against Aristotelian formal and final modes of explanation in science—against what Overton (1991) has termed pattern explanation. When scientists employ pattern explanations, they invoke the patterning of a phenomenon as a means of explanation in its own right—in other words, they abstract pattern from the particular dynamics of an individual’s real-time activity-in-context and employ that pattern as one way to make sense of those dynamics. As Overton (1991) elaborates:

Structure (or pattern, form, system, or organization—all used interchangeably here) is not directly observable and cannot, in principle, be reduced to observables . . . pattern depends as much upon the creative internal sources of the scientist as upon the external source of observation [emphasis added]. (p. 220)

Pattern explanations are not causal explanations in the efficient causal sense of characterizing antecedent “forces” relative to consequent outcomes—what Overton (1991) terms material explanation. Rather, pattern explanations rely on characterizing the organizational forms and functions of individuals and their activities, abstracted across specific time periods and contexts. Such characterizations are themselves treated as explanatory, not simply as temporary, interpretative heuristics that need to be explained materially to count as scientific. By establishing a context of meaning for the particulars of an individual’s time- and context-bound behavior, pattern explanation “introduces order and organization into the domain under investigation” and in this way constitutes its own unique source of explanation (Overton, 1991, p. 220).

When we explain an individual’s behavior by invoking cognitive and personality structures (constructs that capture the individual’s functioning as an individual, as a whole across specific actions and contexts) or the functional consequences served by the behavior, we construct pattern explanations. When we explain an individual’s behavior by invoking a particular stage of development or ideal endpoints and directional sequences of developmental change across stages (ordering our sense of the directionality of development), we construct pattern explanations (Overton, 1991). Psychologists commonly employ these kinds of explanations, but they routinely make the category mistake of treating the holistic forms and functions that they explanatorily invoke not as abstractions but as concrete, antecedent causes of behavior (Lourenco & Machado, 1996). They make the mistake, in other words, of confusing these formal and final modes of explanation for efficient causes—for antecedent forces or factors that initiate an individual’s actual behavior.

Arocha, like Bunge, explicitly espouses “tak[ing] final cause seriously” (Arocha, 2021, p. 385) by admitting goal-seeking behavior into scientific realism’s explanatory framework. Prima facie, then, their approach to scientific realism could be construed as embracing at least some form of pattern explanation (though calls for taking seriously Aristotelian “formal” cause are noticeably absent). However, the final causes to which both Arocha and Bunge appeal are, in fact, not only limited to the intentional, purposive behavior of individuals, but are also concretely and reductively constituted in terms of “a chain of ordinary efficient causes” (i.e., a series of brain processes that eventually cause motor behavior; Bunge, 2006, p. 94). These final causes, in other words, constitute explanation in a scientific realism framework only through reduction to efficient cause. Pattern explanations, like secondary properties, do not really count as explanation in scientific realism until they are reductively analyzed in terms of the concrete objectivity of material explanations and primary properties.

An alternative metatheoretical model: The process-relational paradigm

To fully embrace the variability and complexity of individual behavior requires, we argue, an explanatory pluralism, one that celebrates both pattern and material explanations as equally legitimate, alternative perspectives irreducibly complementing one another in the canon of scientific inquiry and analysis. It requires an epistemological framework that avoids the kind of explanatory reductionism to which scientific realism easily falls victim. The process–relational paradigm provides such a framework by fostering an inclusive metatheoretical space “where foundations are groundings, not bedrocks of certainty, and analysis is about creating categories, not about cutting nature at its joints” (Overton, 2010, p. 13).

The process–relational paradigm eschews scientific realism’s ontological commitment to an absolute, foundational base for reality. Instead, it treats material and pattern explanations—as well as all other classic polarities such as subject and object, structure and function, process and organization, parts and wholes—as “differentiated polarities (i.e., coequals) of a unified (i.e., indissociable) inclusive matrix” (Overton, 2010, p. 14). Each member of a polarity brings to the table of scientific explanation a unique, legitimate, yet inherently limited perspective or point-of-view taken toward any phenomenon under investigation (Overton, 2015). Assigning explanatory significance to both pattern and material explanation, the process–relational paradigm is grounded in a perspectivist framework where “synthesis and analysis, together with reason and observation, operate in an interpenetrating reciprocal fashion . . . in which each individual approach is valued not as a potentially privileged vantage point, but as a necessary line of sight on the whole” (Overton, 2010, p. 18). Neither material nor pattern explanation operates as an absolute or privileged mode of truth; instead, each explanatory perspective complements the other as interdependent frames of understanding, necessarily defining (and being defined by) one another as differentiated aspects of a fuller explanation.

The process–relational paradigm thus substitutes an explanatory pluralism for the explanatory monism of scientific realism. Epistemologically, the explanatory monism of scientific realism reductively privileges material relative to pattern levels of explanation, with the former viewed as foundational to scientific explanation and the latter viewed, at best, as temporary heuristics devoid of any real explanatory power (Overton, 1991). Such privileging unnecessarily delimits the toolbox of scientific explanation. Under the aegis of a process–relational framework, complete understanding of a phenomenon emerges only through the pluralism conferred by pattern and material explanatory perspectives working in conjunction. This, we argue, is precisely what Arocha’s (2021) critical focus on “the actual structure and dynamics of behavior” (p. 384) demands in a metatheoretical framework.