Introduction: Stepping Back Without Stepping Away
Across this series, we have examined a range of familiar explanatory moves: traits, dispositions, stored meanings, internal representations, and the rhetoric that sustains them. Each appeared reasonable. Each felt explanatory. Each brought inquiry to rest.
This final post does not add another critique. Instead, it steps back to let the pattern itself become visible.
1. One Reflex, Many Forms
What we have encountered is not a collection of mistakes, but a single explanatory reflex expressed in multiple guises:
behaviour explained by traits,
action explained by dispositions,
meaning explained by stored representations,
variation explained away as latent stability.
In every case, explanation moves inward — toward the individual — and stops.
2. Why the Pattern Was Hard to See
The pattern remained elusive because each instance felt locally persuasive. No single move looked egregious. Each appealed to familiar intuitions about agency, responsibility, and understanding.
It is only when these moves are placed side by side that their shared structure becomes apparent:
Relational phenomena are redescribed as internal possessions.
Once this structure is seen, it becomes difficult to unsee.
3. What Is Lost When Explanation Stops Early
When explanation closes at the level of inner causes, certain dimensions quietly fall away:
coordination without command,
normativity without enforcement,
stability without necessity,
meaning without storage.
These losses are not accidental. They are the cost of compressing relational processes into bounded interiors.
4. Recognition as Reorientation
The aim of this series has not been to replace one explanation with another. It has been to reorient attention.
Once the pattern is recognised, explanation changes posture:
questions reopen,
relations come back into view,
phenomena regain texture and contingency.
Recognition does not tell us what to think. It changes what we are able to notice.
5. Preparing the Next Step
With the pattern now clear, we are in a position to encounter the next domain without defensiveness.
Biology will soon enter the discussion — not as an enemy of meaning, and not as a master explanation, but as another powerful constraint that is often asked to do ontological work it cannot do.
The explanatory reflex we have diagnosed does not belong to psychology alone. It travels.
Conclusion: Seeing the Habit at Work
Inner causes endure because they satisfy explanatory instincts quickly and convincingly. But speed and conviction are not understanding.
By recognising the pattern rather than attacking its instances, this series leaves readers oriented rather than instructed — able to notice the habit at work wherever it appears.
The next series will follow that habit into biology, where its consequences become especially visible — and especially tempting.
No comments:
Post a Comment