Introduction: Explaining What Is Not There
By this point in the series, the pattern should be visible. Evolutionary psychology does not merely appeal to biology; it repeatedly assigns biology an explanatory role it cannot bear.
Nowhere is this more consequential than in its treatment of meaning‑bearing phenomena: intentions, reasons, norms, preferences, values.
This post advances a simple but decisive claim:
Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain meaning using resources that are not themselves meaningful.
The result is not illumination but erasure.
1. Selection Pressures Are Not Meanings
Evolutionary explanations appeal to selection pressures, fitness payoffs, and adaptive advantages. These are theoretical abstractions used to describe population‑level regularities over time.
They are not, and cannot be:
reasons for acting,
sources of obligation,
objects of intention,
or contents of experience.
Selection pressures are descriptions of constraint, not constituents of meaning.
When evolutionary psychology treats them as explanatory of intention or normativity, it mistakes why something was possible for why something makes sense.
2. Causal History Versus Normative Force
Meaning‑bearing phenomena are not merely caused; they are answerable.
A reason is something that can be given, challenged, defended, or revised. A norm is something that can be upheld or violated. A preference is something that can be reflected upon.
Evolutionary psychology offers causal histories in place of normative force. It tells us how a disposition may have arisen, not why it counts as a reason now.
This substitution evacuates normativity.
To say that a behaviour evolved does not tell us:
whether it is justified,
whether it ought to be followed,
whether it is appropriate in context.
Explanation without normativity is not explanation of meaning.
3. The Disappearance of Intelligibility
From a relational ontology, intelligibility is primary. A phenomenon is what it is only insofar as it is intelligible as something in relation.
Evolutionary psychology bypasses this level entirely.
By relocating explanation to ancestral history, it skips over the relational work through which actions become intelligible to agents and others. Meaning is treated as a surface gloss atop a biological mechanism.
But meaning is not an overlay. It is constitutive.
To explain behaviour without explaining its intelligibility is to explain the wrong thing.
4. Norms Without Normativity
Consider the evolutionary treatment of norms. Norms are often described as evolved strategies for coordination or cooperation.
Whatever the merits of such descriptions at the level of constraint, they fail to account for what makes a norm a norm:
its binding force,
its susceptibility to criticism,
its role in accountability.
A norm is not simply a regularity. It is a relation between agents that oughts in a particular way.
Evolutionary psychology has no resources for this.
5. Reasons Are Relational Phenomena
From a relational ontology, reasons do not reside inside individuals as biological outputs. They emerge in structured relations:
linguistic,
social,
institutional,
symbolic.
A reason exists only insofar as it can be recognised, invoked, and responded to within a shared space of meaning.
Evolutionary psychology treats reasons as if they were internal dispositions waiting to be expressed. In doing so, it mistakes capacity for constitution.
Biology may constrain what reasons can be taken up. It does not produce reasons.
Conclusion: When Explanation Explains Away
The failure of evolutionary psychology to explain meaning is not incidental. It follows directly from its ontological commitments.
By attempting to explain intentions, norms, and preferences using non‑semiotic resources, it collapses explanation into erasure. What makes action intelligible is replaced by a story about how behaviour might have come to exist.
From a relational perspective:
Any account that cannot explain normativity cannot explain meaning.
In the next post, we will turn to a familiar refuge when this problem becomes visible: the appeal to “human nature”, and the reification of stabilised relations into inner traits.
No comments:
Post a Comment