Tuesday, 16 December 2025

What Counts as an Explanation?: 5 Re-entry in Practice

Introduction: From Concept to Application

Understanding the hidden criteria that make explanations feel convincing is important, but the real test comes in practice. How do we maintain explanations that are open, responsive, and oriented rather than closed?

This post offers examples of re-entry in practice, showing how explanations can preserve contact with the phenomenon and invite ongoing inquiry.

1. Attending to Relations, Not Objects

Consider a social phenomenon like cooperation. A shallow explanation might cite an internal trait or a fixed rule and stop there.

A re-entry-oriented explanation, in contrast, examines:

  • how individuals interact in context,

  • the norms and expectations that sustain cooperation,

  • contingencies and variations that allow the pattern to persist or change.

It emphasises relations, not objects. The phenomenon remains answerable to its context rather than being reduced to a single causal element.

2. Allowing Anomalies to Speak

Explanations often ignore anomalies to maintain closure. Re-entry in practice requires treating anomalies as signals, not noise.

Example: A model predicts a behavioural pattern, but some instances deviate. Instead of dismissing these, we ask:

  • Why do these deviations occur?

  • What conditions make the pattern fail?

  • How do these exceptions inform the phenomenon itself?

This keeps understanding alive and prevents the explanation from hardening into inevitability.

3. Iterative Engagement

Re-entry is inherently iterative. An explanation is tested, adjusted, and retested against the phenomenon.

Example: In a study of ecosystem dynamics, initial causal chains may be proposed. Continuous observation, measurement, and contextual analysis refine understanding. The explanation is not a final verdict but a provisional guide.

Iteration ensures that the explanation remains answerable, adapting as new relations emerge.

4. Reflexivity in Explanation

Re-entry also demands reflexivity. The explanatory stance itself is scrutinized:

  • Are assumptions influencing what is observed?

  • Are familiar models or narratives shaping perception?

  • Are we privileging authority or fluency over intelligibility?

Acknowledging the observer’s role maintains openness and guards against over-closure.

5. Preserving Meaning While Using Measures

Even when measurement, models, or formal tools are used, re-entry ensures they remain in service of understanding, not substitutes for it.

Numbers, models, and simulations illuminate relational structures. They are provisional scaffolds, always answerable to the phenomenon rather than treated as definitive explanations.

Conclusion: Explanation as an Ongoing Conversation

Re-entry in practice transforms explanation from a verdict into a conversation. The phenomenon continues to have a voice. Questions remain live. Understanding is provisional, relational, and responsive.

In the next post, we will draw together the conceptual lessons of this series in A New Standard for Explanation, offering a synthesis without closing the door to further inquiry.

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What Counts as an Explanation?: 4 Criteria We Never Admit

Introduction: Hidden Rules of Judgment

By now, it should be clear that explanations often mislead not because they are false, but because we respond to them with unconscious criteria. Certain explanations feel convincing precisely because they align with habits of judgment we rarely articulate.

This post exposes these hidden criteria and examines how they shape the explanatory landscape.

1. Authority and Familiarity

Explanations gain weight when they come from trusted sources, disciplines, or familiar frameworks. Authority is persuasive:

  • expert testimony carries epistemic force,

  • formal models or technical language feel rigorous,

  • widely accepted metaphors resonate.

Familiarity reassures. Repetition breeds trust. But neither guarantees that the explanation actually engages the phenomenon relationally.

2. Simplicity and Elegance

We are drawn to explanations that are tidy and coherent. Simplicity feels correct:

  • fewer steps, fewer variables, fewer contingencies.

  • elegant stories that unify disparate phenomena.

Yet simplicity can mask abstraction and omission. Elegance seduces us into believing that complexity has been tamed when it has only been suppressed.

3. Depth and Reach

As we saw earlier, tracing causes backward gives the impression of depth. Explaining many phenomena with a single principle gives the impression of reach.

These qualities feel convincing because they suggest completeness. They make us think we are seeing the underlying reality rather than a selected slice of it.

Depth and reach are therefore seductive but can mislead if we mistake them for relational intelligibility.

4. Causal Fluency

Explanations that present a smooth chain of causation feel intuitive:

  • the steps connect effortlessly,

  • the logic flows,

  • the narrative seems natural.

This fluency gives a sense of inevitability. Yet what feels smooth is not necessarily what is intelligible or meaningfully sustained in the present.

5. Summary of Hidden Criteria

Together, these criteria form an invisible evaluative lens:

  • Authority and familiarity

  • Simplicity and elegance

  • Depth and reach

  • Causal fluency

They guide our judgments quietly, steering us toward explanations that feel right even when they fail relationally.

6. Preparing for Re-entry

Recognising these hidden standards is essential. Once we see them, we can ask:

  • Does this explanation orient me to the phenomenon?

  • Does it allow re-entry, or does it stop inquiry?

  • Does it respect the relational structure of what I am trying to understand?

In the next post, we will examine re-entry in practice, showing examples of explanations that preserve openness and maintain alignment with the phenomenon rather than our habitual expectations.

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What Counts as an Explanation?: 3 Orientation Over Closure

Introduction: The Danger of Ending Inquiry

Explanation carries a seductive promise: the possibility of closure. Once we feel we understand something, there is relief, satisfaction, and the comforting sense that the problem is solved.

Yet this very comfort can be the enemy of insight. Closure often comes too early, silencing questions before the phenomenon has had its say. In this post, we examine orientation over closure — a principle that keeps explanations open, responsive, and alive.

1. Orientation vs Completion

Orientation is about position, perspective, and responsiveness. An explanatory account that orients:

  • highlights the relevant relations,

  • clarifies what matters and what could vary,

  • leaves space for the phenomenon to resist or push back.

Closure, by contrast, treats explanation as final. It asserts that enough has been said and inquiry can end. The world appears settled, but understanding has been preempted.

2. Signs of Premature Closure

Explanations tend to close inquiry when they:

  • substitute a story for relational clarity,

  • reduce the phenomenon to an antecedent, measure, or model output,

  • claim universality without attending to context,

  • feel authoritative or inevitable.

The common thread is that the explanation stops listening. It imposes understanding rather than facilitating it.

3. How Orientation Preserves Openness

Orientation preserves the potential for re-entry. A well-oriented explanation:

  • exposes assumptions without disguising them,

  • clarifies relations rather than fixating on objects,

  • acknowledges what remains uncertain or contingent,

  • allows further investigation to refine understanding.

The aim is not a final answer but a living understanding.

4. Orientation in Practice

In practice, orientation often feels incomplete, even unsatisfying. It does not give the relief of closure. But it ensures that:

  • explanations remain answerable to phenomena,

  • complexity is acknowledged rather than flattened,

  • subsequent inquiry can build on, rather than overturn, prior insight.

Orientation is thus a disciplined attention, a commitment to responsiveness rather than completion.

5. Preparing for Hidden Criteria

Understanding orientation over closure prepares us to examine the hidden criteria we habitually use to judge explanations. These implicit standards shape what we accept as good explanation, often without conscious awareness.

In the next post, we will make these criteria explicit, showing how authority, familiarity, and perceived simplicity quietly guide our judgments — and how they can mislead.

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What Counts as an Explanation?: 2 Causal Depth vs Present Intelligibility

Introduction: The Temptation of Going Deeper

When faced with a puzzling phenomenon, our first instinct is often to seek a deeper cause. We ask "why" until we reach the furthest back point available: history, mechanism, or prior events. Intuition tells us that deeper explanations are better explanations.

But depth is not synonymous with understanding. This post examines the distinction between causal depth and present intelligibility, a distinction crucial for avoiding habitual explanatory errors.

1. Causal Depth: Tracing the Chain

Causal depth tracks sequences and dependencies:

  • This occurred because that occurred.

  • That occurred because something earlier occurred.

  • And so on.

Causal tracing illuminates conditions and constraints. It shows how a phenomenon could arise in a linear or branching sequence. It identifies enabling factors and vulnerabilities.

Yet causal depth alone does not tell us what the phenomenon is in the present. Knowing the chain of events is not the same as understanding the structure, significance, or intelligibility of what emerges.

2. Present Intelligibility: Understanding What Is

Present intelligibility concerns the relational structure of a phenomenon as it is now:

  • What makes it recognisable?

  • What distinctions does it presuppose?

  • How does it function within its current context?

This kind of understanding is not a matter of looking backward. It is about clarifying what conditions and relations sustain the phenomenon in the present. It allows us to engage with it meaningfully, not just recount its history.

3. Why Depth Misleads

When causal depth is treated as sufficient for explanation, several misfires occur:

  • The phenomenon is reduced to its antecedents rather than its present relations.

  • Historical or mechanistic detail feels authoritative, masking gaps in intelligibility.

  • Depth is mistaken for insight; thorough tracing substitutes for relational clarity.

In other words, causal depth seduces by offering a story, not an understanding.

4. Orienting Without Closing

A relational approach insists that explanation should allow re-entry:

  • Understanding must be open to the phenomenon’s ongoing relations.

  • Depth should inform orientation, not terminate inquiry.

  • Present intelligibility is the criterion that prevents the habitual slide from “how it came to be” to “what it is.”

Depth becomes a resource for understanding, not a claim of completion.

5. Preparing for the Next Step

Recognising the distinction between causal depth and present intelligibility equips us to evaluate explanations deliberately rather than habitually. It is a guardrail against the instinct to equate thoroughness with comprehension.

In the next post, we will explore Orientation Over Closure, showing how explanation can guide understanding without foreclosing it.

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What Counts as an Explanation?: 1 Introduction: Why Explanation Feels Convincing

Introduction: The Lure We Never Name

If the previous series left you unsettled, it may be because something you relied on instinctively — your sense of when an explanation is successful — has been quietly questioned.

Most of us experience a subtle but persistent feeling: an explanation feels right. It satisfies, it reassures, it ends the nagging of uncertainty. It feels convincing in a way that seems objective and reliable.

Yet, as we have begun to see, that feeling is deceptive. It masks a hidden machinery of judgment.

1. Feeling as Evidence

We are trained to trust our intuition about explanation. In conversation, in classrooms, in reading, we encounter accounts that “click” — and we accept them almost immediately.

This is not merely laziness. Feeling is a heuristic: a rapid guide to plausibility when engagement is costly or information is abundant. But like any heuristic, it is fallible.

An explanation that clicks does so because it aligns with familiar patterns of thinking, not necessarily because it captures the phenomenon more accurately or fully.

2. Patterns That Pull Us In

Certain features make explanations particularly compelling:

  • Depth: tracing back in time or mechanism produces a sense of causal security.

  • Simplicity: fewer moving parts and tidy narratives reduce cognitive load.

  • Scope: connecting multiple phenomena under a single account feels powerful.

  • Authority: invoking experts, domains, or models lends reassurance.

Individually, these are not inherently misleading. Together, they form a potent siren song: an explanation feels convincing because it triggers habitual confidence, not because it has survived careful relational scrutiny.

3. Why We Miss the Patterns

This persuasive force explains why the failure modes identified in the first series often go unnoticed:

  • Causal depth is mistaken for ontological depth because we intuitively value “further back.”

  • Total accounts feel complete because we equate narrative coherence with insight.

  • Models and measurement feel authoritative because we trust formal structure and numbers.

  • Regularity feels like necessity because stability reassures.

Each of these is felt, not reasoned. The instinct is so reliable that questioning it feels like a betrayal of common sense.

4. Setting the Stage

The purpose of this series is to make these invisible criteria explicit.

We are not yet critiquing specific theories. Instead, we are asking:

What do we really consider a good explanation, and why do our intuitions mislead us so often?

By bringing these hidden rules to light, we equip ourselves to judge explanations deliberately rather than habitually.

In the next post, we will examine causal depth versus present intelligibility, showing precisely how the explanatory instinct misfires when we equate depth with understanding.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 7 Explanation Without Closure

Introduction: What Has Been Failing

Across this series, we have not identified a single mistaken theory or villainous discipline. We have traced a pattern.

Explanation keeps failing not because we lack intelligence, data, or technique, but because explanation is repeatedly asked to do the wrong kind of work.

Again and again, it is pressed into service as a way of ending inquiry rather than orienting it.

1. The Recurrent Temptation

Each failure mode we have examined follows the same underlying temptation:

  • to go deeper rather than clearer,

  • to explain everything rather than this,

  • to let models answer instead of asking,

  • to let numbers stand in for meaning,

  • to let stability harden into necessity.

These moves differ in style, but they share a common aim: relief from uncertainty.

Explanation becomes a device for reassurance.

2. Why Closure Feels Like Success

Explanatory closure feels successful because it produces quiet.

Questions subside. Doubts recede. The phenomenon appears contained. This calm is often mistaken for understanding.

But silence is not insight.

When explanation closes inquiry, it does not resolve complexity. It screens it off.

3. Explanation as Orientation

An alternative picture of explanation emerges once closure is refused.

On this view, explanation does not aim to finish the work. It aims to situate it. A good explanation leaves us better oriented:

  • clearer about what matters,

  • more precise about what is at stake,

  • more sensitive to what could vary.

It does not remove the need for judgment. It sharpens it.

4. Keeping Possibility Alive

What explanation must preserve, above all, is possibility.

Not abstract possibility, but situated alternatives — the sense that phenomena are sustained by relations that could, under other conditions, be otherwise.

This is not a denial of constraint. It is a refusal to confuse constraint with destiny.

5. What This Series Has Not Done

This series has deliberately avoided offering a replacement theory.

That is not an omission. It is a commitment.

Any theory offered too soon would simply become another device of closure, another framework ready to answer in advance.

What has been offered instead is a recalibration of explanatory appetite.

Conclusion: Explanation as an Ongoing Responsibility

Explanation fails when it seeks rest.

It succeeds when it accepts responsibility for staying with the phenomenon — attending to its relations, its conditions, and its continued becoming.

Explanation should not settle the world. It should keep us answerable to it.

If this series has done its work, it has not instructed. It has reoriented.

And that, perhaps, is the most explanation should ever promise.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 6 Stability Is Not Necessity

Introduction: When the World Seems Settled

Some explanations draw their force not from drama, but from calm.

They point to regularity, persistence, and repetition. They note that certain patterns recur, that certain arrangements endure, that certain outcomes reliably reappear. From this stability, an impression of inevitability quietly forms.

This post argues that this impression is mistaken.

Stability is not necessity.

When regularity hardens into inevitability, explanation quietly fails.

1. The Seductive Logic of Regularity

Regular patterns invite a simple inference: if something keeps happening, it must have to happen.

This inference feels reasonable because regularity reduces uncertainty. Stable arrangements are easier to plan around, model, and predict. Over time, predictability acquires the sheen of necessity.

But repetition alone does not establish inevitability. It only establishes habit.

2. From Description to Constraint

A common explanatory slide occurs when a description of what does happen is treated as a statement about what must happen.

At this point, explanation shifts from:

  • these conditions tend to produce this outcome

  • to this outcome could not be otherwise.

What was once a contingent regularity is recast as a binding constraint.

3. How Stability Acquires Authority

Stability gains authority through duration.

The longer a pattern persists, the more it appears natural. Alternative possibilities fade from view, not because they are impossible, but because they are no longer imagined.

Explanations then begin to cite stability itself as evidence of necessity:

  • this has always been the case,

  • it works because it endures,

  • change would disrupt a proven order.

These are rhetorical moves, not ontological discoveries.

4. The Erasure of Possibility

When stability is mistaken for necessity, possibility is erased.

Phenomena are no longer understood as ongoing accomplishments of relation, but as expressions of fixed structure. What persists is treated as what must persist.

This erasure is subtle. Nothing dramatic is denied. Alternatives simply stop appearing as alternatives at all.

5. Why Meaning Suffers Again

Meaning-bearing phenomena are especially vulnerable here.

Norms, roles, and expectations often exhibit stability. When this stability is misread as necessity, meaning becomes destiny. Reasons harden into rules; patterns of coordination become inner properties.

What is lost is the sense that these phenomena continue to require maintenance, uptake, and recognition.

Conclusion: Restoring Contingency Without Chaos

Recognising that stability is not necessity does not plunge us into disorder.

It restores a crucial distinction:

What persists does so because relations continue to hold, not because alternatives are impossible.

A relational approach keeps explanation oriented toward the conditions that sustain regularity, rather than treating regularity as explanation itself.

In the final post, we will draw these threads together and ask what explanation would look like if it remained open to possibility rather than closing it down.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 5 When Measurement Replaces Meaning

Introduction: The Authority of Numbers

Measurement carries an aura of objectivity.

Numbers appear neutral, portable, and decisive. They promise clarity where interpretation seems messy and certainty where judgment feels fragile. In contemporary explanation, measurement is often treated not merely as a tool, but as a guarantor of reality itself.

This post examines what happens when measurement stops supporting explanation and begins replacing meaning.

1. What Measurement Actually Does

Measurement does not discover phenomena. It operationalises them.

To measure something is to decide:

  • what counts as a unit,

  • what distinctions matter,

  • what variation can be ignored.

These decisions are not neutral. They presuppose a prior understanding of what the phenomenon is supposed to be.

Measurement, therefore, depends on meaning before it can quantify anything at all.

2. From Indicator to Identity

A common explanatory slippage occurs when an indicator becomes an identity.

What begins as:

  • this variable tracks some aspect of the phenomenon
    quietly turns into:

  • this variable is the phenomenon.

At that point, explanation collapses into reporting. To explain is simply to cite the number.

What the phenomenon means — how it is lived, interpreted, or oriented — disappears from view.

3. Why Quantification Feels Final

Quantitative accounts feel conclusive because they resist argument.

You can debate an interpretation, but it is harder to dispute a figure once its legitimacy has been institutionally secured. Measurement thus acquires epistemic authority that exceeds its explanatory role.

Numbers end conversations not because they explain better, but because they explain faster.

4. The Erasure of Context

Meaning-bearing phenomena are inherently contextual. They depend on relations, histories, norms, and expectations.

Measurement strips context in order to stabilise comparison.

This trade-off is sometimes worth making. But when stripped context is treated as explanatory residue rather than loss, meaning is quietly erased.

What remains is a flattened phenomenon that behaves well statistically and poorly ontologically.

5. When Measurement Becomes Ontology

The deepest error occurs when what is measurable is treated as what is real.

At this point, phenomena that resist quantification are reclassified as:

  • subjective,

  • secondary,

  • or explanatorily irrelevant.

This is not a discovery about the world. It is an artefact of the measurement regime.

Conclusion: Recovering Meaning Without Rejecting Measure

The problem is not measurement itself. It is the forgetting of what measurement presupposes.

A relational approach insists that:

Measurement must answer to meaning, not replace it.

Numbers can illuminate relations, but they cannot constitute them.

In the next post, we will examine how explanation fails in a final, subtler way: when descriptions of stability are mistaken for explanations of necessity.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 4 Models That Answer for Us

Introduction: From Aid to Authority

Models are among the most powerful tools of explanation.

They simplify, stabilise, and render phenomena tractable. They allow us to see patterns that would otherwise remain diffuse or invisible. At their best, models support inquiry by sharpening questions and clarifying relations.

But models have a tendency to change roles.

This post examines what happens when models stop assisting inquiry and begin answering on our behalf.

1. What Models Are For

A model is not a mirror of reality. It is a selective construction designed to foreground certain relations while bracketing others.

Properly understood, a model:

  • highlights relevant variables,

  • suppresses distracting detail,

  • makes explicit a set of assumptions.

Crucially, a model is meant to be used, not believed.

Its value lies in how it orients investigation, not in how comprehensively it describes the world.

2. When Models Become Answers

Trouble begins when a model’s outputs are treated as explanations rather than prompts.

At this point, inquiry shifts from:

  • Is the model adequate to this phenomenon?

  • to How does this phenomenon instantiate the model?

The direction of fit reverses. The phenomenon must now conform to the model in order to be intelligible.

What started as a tool becomes an authority.

3. Informal Models and Conceptual Shortcuts

This substitution does not require mathematics or formalism.

Informal models — metaphors, narratives, typologies — can perform the same function. Once a familiar explanatory pattern is in place, it begins to answer questions automatically.

Examples include:

  • equilibrium metaphors,

  • optimisation stories,

  • signal–response schemas,

  • agent-based caricatures.

These models feel explanatory because they are familiar, not because they are adequate.

4. The Quiet Loss of Phenomenal Contact

As models take over explanatory work, direct engagement with phenomena diminishes.

Anomalies become noise. Context becomes decoration. Meaning becomes an output variable.

The model continues to function smoothly precisely because it is no longer answerable to what it was meant to explain.

Inquiry has not advanced; it has been delegated.

5. Why This Feels Like Progress

Model substitution feels like progress because it produces:

  • faster answers,

  • cleaner narratives,

  • scalable explanations.

What it does not produce is deeper understanding.

The smoothness of explanation masks the growing distance between the model and the phenomenon.

Conclusion: Keeping Models in Their Place

The problem is not that we use models. It is that we forget what they are.

A relational approach treats models as provisional articulations of possible relations, not as engines of truth.

Models should sharpen our questions, not silence them.

In the next post, we will examine a closely related temptation: the urge to replace explanation with measurement, and the quiet authority that numbers acquire when models are taken for reality.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 3 The Seduction of Total Accounts

Introduction: When Explanation Wants Everything

Some explanations do not merely aim to clarify a phenomenon. They aspire to explain everything.

They promise coherence across domains, unification of disparate facts, and a single framework within which all relevant questions can be answered. Their appeal is obvious. If one account can do all the work, inquiry becomes efficient, elegant, and complete.

This post argues that such total accounts are not merely ambitious. They are explanatorily dangerous.

Theories that explain everything tend to hollow out what they explain.

1. The Appeal of Totality

Total accounts are seductive because they resolve fragmentation. They offer a single explanatory language that seems to travel effortlessly across levels, contexts, and phenomena.

Once adopted, they allow us to say:

  • this too is an instance of the same principle,

  • that apparent exception is really just another case,

  • nothing lies outside the scope of the theory.

This produces a powerful sense of mastery.

But mastery is not the same as understanding.

2. When Scope Replaces Precision

As explanatory scope expands, precision often contracts.

To explain everything, a theory must abstract away from the particularities that differentiate phenomena. What remains is a thin explanatory template that fits widely precisely because it says little.

The danger is subtle. The theory continues to generate correct-sounding explanations while quietly losing contact with the phenomena’s specific modes of intelligibility.

What is gained in coverage is lost in depth.

3. Phenomena Reduced to Instances

Total accounts tend to treat phenomena as interchangeable instances of a general mechanism or principle.

Once this move is made, the work of explanation shifts:

  • from asking what makes this phenomenon intelligible,

  • to showing how it fits the theory.

The phenomenon no longer resists explanation. It is absorbed.

But resistance is precisely what keeps inquiry alive.

4. The Illusion of Explanatory Completion

Because total accounts leave little unexplained, they create the impression that inquiry has reached its endpoint.

Questions that do not fit the framework are reclassified as misguided, superficial, or already answered “in principle”.

This is not explanatory success. It is explanatory foreclosure.

The theory has not explained the world; it has shrunk the space in which explanation is allowed to occur.

5. Why Meaning Suffers First

Meaning-bearing phenomena are especially vulnerable to total accounts.

Because meaning is constituted relationally and contextually, it resists uniform explanation. Total frameworks respond by flattening meaning into:

  • signals,

  • functions,

  • outputs,

  • or effects.

The appearance of explanation remains, but meaning itself thins out. What is lost is not accuracy but intelligibility.

Conclusion: The Cost of Explaining Everything

The problem with total accounts is not that they are false. It is that they succeed too well on their own terms.

By explaining everything, they leave nothing to investigate.

A relational approach insists on a different explanatory virtue:

An explanation should make room for the phenomenon to push back.

In the next post, we will examine how models and frameworks begin to answer questions on our behalf—and what is lost when inquiry is delegated in this way.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 2 Causal Depth Is Not Ontological Depth

Introduction: The Deeper the Better?

When explanations feel unsatisfying, the usual remedy is to go deeper.

If a phenomenon is puzzling, we look for a cause beneath it. If that cause seems thin, we look for a deeper one still — further back in time, further down into mechanism, further away from the surface of experience.

This reflex is so familiar that it rarely appears as a choice. Depth is assumed to be explanatory virtue.

This post challenges that assumption.

Its central claim is simple:

Reaching further back in time or mechanism does not, by itself, produce better explanation.

Causal depth and ontological depth are not the same thing.

1. What Causal Depth Offers

Causal explanations trace sequences: this happened because that happened, which in turn was caused by something else.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Causal depth can reveal:

  • dependencies,

  • constraints,

  • enabling conditions,

  • vulnerabilities.

In many domains — engineering, epidemiology, materials science — deeper causal chains genuinely increase explanatory power.

The trouble begins when causal depth is mistaken for ontological sufficiency.

2. The Slide from Cause to Constitution

A common explanatory slide occurs here:

  1. A phenomenon is identified.

  2. A prior cause is located.

  3. The cause is treated as constitutive of the phenomenon itself.

At this point, explanation changes character. What once described how something came to be possible is now taken to explain what it is.

This slide is rarely argued for. It is assumed.

But causes do not automatically constitute the things they enable. A history can condition a phenomenon without determining its present intelligibility.

3. Temporal Distance and Explanatory Authority

Explanations that reach far back in time often feel especially authoritative. Ancestry, origin, and deep history carry rhetorical weight.

The farther away the cause, the harder it becomes to contest.

Yet temporal distance does not guarantee relevance.

An account of how something emerged does not, by itself, explain how it functions now, what relations sustain it, or why it means what it does in the present.

When temporal depth substitutes for ontological analysis, explanation becomes displacement.

4. Mechanism Without Meaning

A similar issue arises with mechanistic depth. Breaking a phenomenon into smaller parts and processes can be illuminating — up to a point.

But not all phenomena are constituted by mechanisms in the same way.

Meaning-bearing phenomena, in particular, cannot be explained solely by decomposing them into sub-personal processes. No matter how detailed the mechanism, it does not tell us:

  • what counts as a reason,

  • why a norm binds,

  • how an action is intelligible in context.

Mechanistic depth explains how something can occur, not what it is as a phenomenon.

5. Ontological Depth as Relational Structure

Ontological depth concerns what must be in place for a phenomenon to exist as the kind of thing it is.

From a relational perspective, this means asking:

  • what relations constitute the phenomenon,

  • what distinctions it presupposes,

  • what alternatives it excludes.

Depth here is not a matter of going further back or further down, but of clarifying the structure of possibility within which the phenomenon is actualised.

This kind of depth keeps inquiry oriented toward the present.

Conclusion: Depth Without Displacement

The problem with many contemporary explanations is not that they go too deep, but that they go deep in the wrong direction.

By equating depth with causal distance, they trade ontological clarity for narrative authority.

A relational approach insists on a different standard:

An explanation is deep only insofar as it clarifies what makes the phenomenon what it is.

In the next post, we will examine a powerful temptation that arises once depth is misidentified: the urge to explain everything at once, and the hollowing effect of total accounts.

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Why Explanation Keeps Failing: 1 When Explanation Stops Thinking

Introduction: The Feeling of Having Understood

There is a distinctive sensation that accompanies a good explanation. The pieces seem to fall into place. Uncertainty recedes. The question that was pressing a moment ago loses its urgency.

That feeling is not incidental. It is one of the primary signals by which we judge explanatory success.

This post argues that the signal is unreliable.

Many explanations fail not because they are incorrect, but because they are too satisfying. They resolve the discomfort of not knowing by ending inquiry rather than deepening it.

1. Explanation as Relief

Explanation often functions as relief from uncertainty. Faced with complexity, contingency, or ambiguity, an explanation offers narrative, structure, and direction.

This is not a defect. Without some stabilisation, inquiry cannot proceed at all.

But relief becomes a problem when it is mistaken for understanding.

An explanation that feels complete can discourage further questioning even when it has not made the phenomenon more intelligible in its present relations.

2. The Difference Between Answering and Orienting

There is a crucial distinction between explanations that answer questions and explanations that orient inquiry.

Answering explanations aim to terminate a line of questioning. They identify a cause, a mechanism, or an origin and treat it as sufficient.

Orienting explanations, by contrast, clarify what kind of thing is being investigated, what relations matter, and what further questions are now meaningful to ask.

Much contemporary explanation prioritises answers at the expense of orientation.

3. Why Closure Feels Like Success

Explanatory closure feels like success because it reduces cognitive load. Once a phenomenon has been located within a familiar framework, the pressure to keep thinking eases.

This effect is amplified when explanations:

  • appeal to deep causes,

  • invoke authoritative domains,

  • or reach far into history.

The further away the explanation is placed, the harder it becomes to re-enter the phenomenon itself.

4. What Gets Lost When Inquiry Ends

When explanation ends too soon, several things are quietly lost:

  • the present conditions under which a phenomenon is intelligible,

  • the relations that sustain or transform it,

  • the possibility that it might be otherwise.

What remains is a description of how it came to be, standing in for an account of what it is.

Conclusion: Keeping Explanation Alive

This series begins from a simple suspicion: that explanation has been asked to do the wrong kind of work.

Rather than keeping inquiry alive, many explanations function to stop it. They answer questions that feel urgent while leaving the phenomenon itself underexamined.

In the next post, we will examine one of the most common ways this happens: the confusion of causal depth with ontological depth.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 8 What a Relational Account Would Say Instead (Without Saying It Yet)

 Introduction: Ending Without Replacing

This series has been deliberately critical. It has taken evolutionary psychology at its word, followed its explanations to their limits, and shown where they close inquiry rather than extend it.

What it has not done is offer a rival theory of behaviour, cognition, or mind.

That restraint is intentional.

The aim of this final post is not to replace one explanatory framework with another, but to show how a relational ontology reframes the very questions evolutionary psychology believes it answers.

1. Relation as Primary

A relational ontology begins from a simple but far‑reaching commitment:

Relations are not secondary connections between pre‑existing entities; they are constitutive of what entities are.

On this view, individuals are not self‑contained bearers of traits that then interact. They are nodes in structured fields of relation, actualising possibilities made available by those fields.

This shift is decisive.

Questions framed in terms of what is inside the individual give way to questions about what relations make this phenomenon possible.

2. Meaning Is Constituted, Not Inherited

From a relational perspective, meaning does not travel through history as a latent content waiting to be expressed. It is constituted in present relations:

  • linguistic,

  • social,

  • institutional,

  • symbolic.

Biology and history matter—but as constraints on what can be actualised, not as carriers of meaning themselves.

To ask why an action means what it does is not to ask about its ancestral origin, but about the relations that make it intelligible now.

This reframing does not deny evolution. It relocates it.

3. Explanation Without Essence

Relational explanation does not seek hidden inner essences to stabilise behaviour. It traces how regularities emerge, persist, and transform through structured relations.

What evolutionary psychology calls “human nature” appears here as sedimented relational patterning—durable, influential, but never necessary or exhaustive.

Explanation remains accountable to contingency.

4. Systems as Open Theories of Possibility

In a relational ontology, systems are not causal machines that generate outcomes. They are theories of possible instances: structured spaces that specify what can count as a phenomenon.

To explain an instance is to show how it is made possible within such a system, not to reduce it to a hidden cause.

Crucially, this form of explanation does not end inquiry. It invites re‑entry.

If relations change, possibilities change. If meanings shift, phenomena shift.

5. Why Explanation Must Remain Open

Meaning‑bearing phenomena are not solved once and for all. They are continually re‑actualised in new contexts.

Any explanation that claims finality—whether through biology, history, or essence—mistakes stability for closure.

A relational account resists that temptation. It treats explanation as orientation rather than termination, as a way of keeping phenomena intelligible without exhausting them.

Conclusion: Saying Less to See More

This series has argued that evolutionary psychology explains too much too quickly, and in doing so, explains away the very phenomena it seeks to understand.

A relational ontology proposes no counter‑myth. It offers a different discipline of explanation—one that keeps relations visible, meaning constitutive, and inquiry open.

What it would say instead is therefore best expressed negatively:

Not that behaviour is written inside us, but that it is made possible between us.

Saying more than this, for now, would be premature.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 7 Ideology Without Villains: Why the Politics Follows Anyway

Introduction: No Conspiracy Required

Critiques of evolutionary psychology are often met with a familiar defence. Whatever its flaws, the argument goes, the field is scientific, not political. Its practitioners are not ideologues, and its claims are not prescriptions.

This defence is partly correct—and deeply misleading.

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it secretly smuggles in a political programme. It is that its ontological commitments reliably stabilise particular political effects, regardless of intention.

This post advances a careful but firm claim:

Evolutionary psychology need not be ideologically motivated to function ideologically.

No villains are required.

1. From Ontology to Politics

Ontologies do political work.

They determine what kinds of things are taken to exist, where causes are located, and what forms of change appear possible or impossible. Once these commitments are in place, downstream interpretations follow with remarkable consistency.

Evolutionary psychology commits itself to:

  • inner traits as explanatory units,

  • ancestral history as primary cause,

  • behavioural regularities as evidence of necessity.

These commitments do not dictate a political stance. But they structure the space in which political interpretations become natural.

2. The Naturalisation of Hierarchy

When behavioural differences are explained as evolved traits, hierarchies acquire a distinctive gloss: they appear natural.

Differences in status, power, gendered roles, or social outcomes are no longer primarily questions of institutional design or relational organisation. They become expressions of biological endowment shaped by selection.

This move does not require anyone to endorse inequality. It simply renders inequality intelligible as expected.

What is naturalised becomes resistant to critique.

3. The Individualisation of Responsibility

At the same time, evolutionary psychology individualises explanation.

If behaviour flows from inner dispositions, responsibility attaches to persons rather than relations. Structural conditions fade into background constraint. Institutions become stage-setting rather than constitutive.

Social outcomes are thus framed as:

  • the aggregation of individual tendencies,

  • the playing-out of evolved preferences,

  • the result of differential traits.

This framing quietly aligns with political narratives that emphasise personal responsibility while minimising structural accountability.

Again, no intention is required.

4. Stability Masquerading as Truth

Because evolutionary explanations reach far into the past, they lend present arrangements a sense of inevitability.

If things are this way because they evolved this way, then radical change appears naïve at best, dangerous at worst. The future is framed as constrained repetition rather than open possibility.

This does not mandate conservatism. But it privileges stability over transformation, adjustment over reconfiguration.

Ontology does the work ideology need not.

5. Why Motives Miss the Point

Focusing on the personal politics of evolutionary psychologists—whether they are progressive, conservative, or apolitical—misses the structural issue.

Ideology is not primarily a matter of belief. It is a matter of what explanations make easy, and what they make hard.

Evolutionary psychology makes it easy to explain behaviour without interrogating relations, institutions, or meanings. It makes it hard to imagine alternatives that are not already constrained by an inherited nature.

That asymmetry has political consequences regardless of motive.

Conclusion: Ideology as Effect, Not Intent

The ideological impact of evolutionary psychology does not arise from bad actors or hidden agendas. It arises from the cumulative effect of its ontological commitments.

By naturalising hierarchy, individualising responsibility, and privileging stability, it quietly aligns with conservative outcomes—even when its practitioners explicitly reject them.

From a relational perspective:

Politics enters not through intention, but through ontology.

In the final post of this series, we will turn away from critique and ask what a genuinely relational orientation to explanation would make possible instead.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 6 Over-Closure and the End of Inquiry

Introduction: When Explanation Stops Thinking

At this point in the series, a pattern has emerged with some clarity. Evolutionary psychology does not merely offer explanations that are contestable; it offers explanations that end inquiry.

This post names that pattern directly. Its focus is not a single concept—blank slates, EEAs, human nature—but a deeper methodological disposition: adaptationism as premature closure.

The central claim is this:

By answering “why” questions too quickly, evolutionary psychology forecloses the relational investigation through which meaning actually becomes intelligible.

Its explanations feel satisfying precisely because they stop the questions that matter most.

1. Adaptationism and the Illusion of Depth

Adaptationist explanation follows a familiar rhythm:

  1. Identify a behavioural pattern.

  2. Propose an ancestral problem it might have solved.

  3. Infer a trait or disposition shaped by selection.

Once this story is told, explanation appears complete. The phenomenon is said to be “accounted for”.

But what has actually happened?

The behaviour has been displaced from its present relational conditions and relocated to a speculative past. The explanation feels deep because it reaches far back in time, but it does so at the cost of explanatory traction now.

Depth here is temporal, not ontological.

2. Why Questions Asked Too Soon

From a relational perspective, “why” questions must be asked carefully. There is a crucial difference between:

  • Why does this phenomenon make sense here?

  • Why might something like this ever have existed?

Evolutionary psychology habitually answers the second question while pretending to address the first.

In doing so, it short-circuits inquiry. Once an adaptive story is offered, further investigation into meaning, normativity, and situational intelligibility appears redundant.

The explanation closes the space in which explanation should operate.

3. The Loss of Present-Oriented Explanation

Meaning-bearing phenomena are constituted in the present: in relations among agents, symbols, institutions, and contexts.

Evolutionary explanations, however, are not present-oriented. They trade intelligibility for ancestry.

As a result, they offer no account of:

  • how a reason functions as a reason now,

  • how a norm binds in this situation,

  • how an intention is recognised and responded to here.

What is lost is not historical truth, but explanatory relevance.

4. Systems as Theories of Possible Instances

A relational ontology offers a different conception of explanation altogether.

Systems are not repositories of hidden causes. They are theories of possible instances: structured fields of potential that specify what can count as an intelligible phenomenon.

Explanation, on this view, does not terminate inquiry. It orients it.

To explain a phenomenon is to show:

  • what relations make it possible,

  • what distinctions it presupposes,

  • what alternatives it excludes.

This kind of explanation opens space rather than closing it.

5. Why Over-Closure Feels Like Understanding

Over-closure is attractive because it offers relief. Complexity is reduced. Contingency is domesticated. Uncertainty is replaced with narrative.

Adaptationist stories are especially effective at producing this feeling. They combine scientific authority with mythic coherence: this is how it came to be.

But feeling understood is not the same as understanding.

Where inquiry ends too soon, meaning has been bypassed rather than explained.

Conclusion: Explanation That Makes Room

The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it asks evolutionary questions. It is that it lets those questions do work they cannot do.

By treating adaptationist stories as answers rather than prompts, it closes inquiry precisely where relational explanation should begin.

From a relational perspective:

An explanation that cannot be re-entered is not an explanation of meaning.

In the final post of this series, we will draw these threads together and ask what a genuinely relational alternative to evolutionary psychology might look like—not as a replacement theory, but as a different orientation to explanation itself.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 5 Human Nature Revisited: From Stabilised Relations to Reified Traits

Introduction: The Return of Essence

When evolutionary psychology runs up against the limits of its explanatory resources—when history can no longer account for meaning, and biology can no longer explain normativity—it reaches for a familiar refuge: human nature.

Invoked carefully, the term appears modest and commonsensical. Surely there must be something stable about humans, something shared, something enduring.

But in evolutionary psychology, “human nature” performs a far more ambitious role. It becomes an inner explanatory essence: a set of traits, dispositions, or modules that are said to produce behaviour across contexts.

From a relational-ontological perspective, this move marks another decisive error: the conversion of stabilised relational regularities into reified inner properties.

1. From Populations to Persons

Evolutionary psychology draws heavily on population-level patterns. Statistical regularities are identified across groups, cultures, or experimental conditions, and these regularities are then attributed to features of human nature.

This step is rarely scrutinised.

But population statistics are not ontological facts about individuals. They are abstractions over distributions of behaviour under particular conditions.

To move from:

many people often behave in this way under these circumstances

to:

humans have a trait that causes this behaviour

is not inference but reification.

From a relational perspective, individuals do not instantiate population averages. They actualise possibilities within specific relational configurations.

2. Regularity Is Not Necessity

Stability in behaviour is often treated as evidence of necessity. If a pattern recurs, it is taken to reveal an underlying essence.

But regularity does not imply inevitability.

A behaviour may be:

  • statistically frequent,

  • culturally widespread,

  • historically persistent,

without being necessary, universal, or internally specified.

Relational systems stabilise. Practices sediment. Institutions endure.

These stabilisations generate regularities without invoking inner essences. Evolutionary psychology, however, routinely treats regularity as proof of necessity.

This mistake makes the world appear more fixed than it is.

3. The Appeal of Reification

Reification feels explanatory because it simplifies.

Once a pattern is located inside the individual—as a trait, module, or disposition—it appears to travel with the person across contexts. Complexity is reduced to transportable cause.

But this explanatory feeling is illusory.

What has been explained is not the phenomenon, but our discomfort with contingency.

By relocating explanation inward, evolutionary psychology avoids the harder task of tracing how behaviour is constituted across relations, contexts, and meanings.

4. Human Nature as Sedimented Relation

From a relational ontology, what is called “human nature” is better understood as sedimented regularity of relation.

Humans are born into:

  • social structures,

  • symbolic systems,

  • institutional arrangements,

  • biological constraints.

Over time, certain ways of acting, valuing, and relating stabilise. They recur not because they are written inside us, but because the relations that support them persist.

To call this sedimentation “nature” is to mistake durability for essence.

5. Why the Error Matters

Reifying stabilised relations into traits has predictable consequences:

  • it individualises what is relational,

  • it naturalises what is contingent,

  • it limits what can be imagined as otherwise.

Once labelled “human nature”, a pattern becomes resistant to critique. What might have been examined as institutional, cultural, or symbolic is instead treated as inevitable.

The move does not explain behaviour. It insulates it.

Conclusion: Essence Without Ontology

Evolutionary psychology’s appeal to human nature is not the discovery of a deep truth, but the reappearance of an old metaphysical habit.

Faced with complex, stabilised patterns of relation, it posits inner essences to hold them together.

From a relational perspective:

what appears as human nature is a history of relations that has forgotten itself.

In the next post, we will examine how this reification feeds directly into a final problem: the premature closure of inquiry, and the sense that explanation has already been delivered.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 4 Meaning Without Meaning: Why Evolutionary Psychology Cannot Explain Reasons

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.

No agent chooses because of a selection pressure.
No norm binds because it maximises fitness.
No preference is felt because it solved an ancestral problem.

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.

Fitness does not obligate.
Selection does not justify.
History does not command.

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.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 3 The EEA and the Myth of Explanatory History

Introduction: A History That Explains Too Much

Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on a deceptively simple idea: that many features of the modern human mind can be explained by reference to an ancestral Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). Behaviours, preferences, and cognitive patterns are said to make sense once we see them as adaptations to problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors.

At first glance, this looks like a perfectly reasonable scientific move. History, after all, matters.

But from a relational-ontological perspective, the EEA plays a far more problematic role. It does not merely contextualise explanation; it stands in for it.

This post argues that the EEA functions as a speculative placeholder that masquerades as causal explanation — and in doing so, prematurely closes inquiry into how present phenomena are actually constituted.

1. The EEA Is Reconstructed, Not Discovered

The first thing to note about the EEA is that it is not an empirical object in the ordinary sense. No one observes an EEA. No one measures it directly. No one encounters it as a phenomenon.

Instead, EEAs are reconstructed retrospectively.

Researchers begin with present-day behaviours or traits, assume these are adaptations, and then infer a plausible ancestral environment in which those traits would have been advantageous. The environment is tailored to the trait, not the other way around.

This reverses the usual direction of explanation.

What is presented as historical discovery is, in fact, theoretical backfilling.

2. The Elasticity of Ancestral Environments

One reason the EEA remains so attractive is its extraordinary flexibility.

Because ancestral environments are only loosely specified, they can be adjusted to accommodate almost any behavioural regularity. Aggression? Scarcity and competition. Cooperation? Kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Risk aversion? Variable resources. Risk seeking? High-reward uncertainty.

The EEA stretches to fit the story.

This elasticity gives evolutionary explanations a distinctive rhetorical power: they appear deep, naturalistic, and unavoidable. But scientifically, it signals a lack of constraint.

An explanation that can account for everything in principle explains very little in practice.

3. Post Hoc Adaptation Stories

Once the EEA is in place, adaptationist narratives follow easily. Traits are reverse‑engineered as solutions to ancestral problems, regardless of whether alternative explanations have been exhausted.

From a relational perspective, this is not explanation but retrospective sense‑making.

The story is built backward from the phenomenon, not outward from its present constitution. Historical plausibility substitutes for ontological clarity.

The question quietly shifts from:

How is this behaviour presently produced and understood?

to:

What past problem could this behaviour have solved?

The former opens inquiry. The latter closes it.

4. History Versus Intelligibility

Relational ontology draws a sharp distinction between historical condition and present intelligibility.

History may constrain what is possible. It does not, by itself, render anything intelligible.

To understand a phenomenon is not merely to trace its lineage, but to grasp how it is constituted now: in relation, in context, in meaning.

The EEA trades on a confusion between these levels. It treats historical conjecture as if it were a sufficient account of present sense‑making.

But no agent acts in an EEA.
No norm binds in an EEA.
No preference is felt in an EEA.

These are all present, relational phenomena.

5. The Closure Effect

Perhaps the most damaging feature of the EEA is not its speculative nature, but its closure effect.

Once a behaviour is assigned to an ancestral environment, further questions appear unnecessary. Social, cultural, symbolic, and institutional analyses are relegated to surface variation.

Explanation has already been delivered — in the deep past.

From a relational standpoint, this is precisely backwards. Explanation should move toward the relations that constitute a phenomenon, not retreat into conjectural history.

Conclusion: History Is Not an Answer

The problem with the EEA is not that it appeals to history, but that it treats history as if it were explanatory in itself.

Evolutionary psychology repeatedly substitutes reconstructed ancestral environments for present‑oriented analysis. In doing so, it replaces the hard work of understanding relational constitution with the comfort of origin stories.

From a relational ontology:

History constrains the space of possibility; it does not explain the actuality of meaning.

In the next post, we will turn to the most consequential consequence of this move: the attempt to explain reasons, norms, and intentions using resources that are not themselves meaningful.

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Against Evolutionary Psychology: 2 Mislocated Ontology: When Constraints Are Treated as Causes

Introduction: A Subtle but Fatal Mistake

In the previous post, we saw how evolutionary psychology secures its footing by defining itself against a caricature of the blank slate. That manoeuvre clears rhetorical space for biology to enter the scene as an explanatory authority.

But the deeper problem with evolutionary psychology is not rhetorical. It is ontological.

This post identifies the core error that quietly structures almost every evolutionary-psychological explanation:

the treatment of constraints as if they were causes, and of causes as if they constituted phenomena.

From a relational perspective, this is not a minor confusion. It is a category mistake that propagates through the entire framework.

1. Constraint Is Not Constitution

All serious theories of human behaviour accept constraint. Bodies constrain what can be done. Histories constrain what is likely. Evolution constrains what is possible.

What is at issue is not whether constraints exist, but what explanatory role they are allowed to play.

Evolutionary psychology repeatedly moves from the uncontroversial claim:

human behaviour is constrained by biological history,

to the much stronger and usually unargued claim:

human behaviour is constituted by biological history.

This slide is decisive.

A constraint limits the space of possible actualisations. A constitution specifies what something is.

Confusing the two produces an explanation that feels powerful while doing remarkably little work.

2. Selection History Is Not a Phenomenon

Evolutionary explanations appeal to selection histories: traits are said to exist because they were adaptive in ancestral environments.

From a relational ontology, such histories have a very specific status. They are theoretical reconstructions, not present phenomena.

They are:

  • abstract,

  • population-level,

  • historically conjectural.

Crucially, they are not experienced, enacted, or meaningful in the present.

Yet evolutionary psychology regularly treats selection history as if it were an operative psychological force—something that produces intentions, preferences, or norms here and now.

This is a mistake of ontological placement.

Selection history may describe the conditions under which certain capacities became possible. It does not, by itself, explain how any present phenomenon is constituted.

3. The Non‑Phenomenality of Evolutionary Causes

From a relational standpoint, a phenomenon is not simply something that exists. It is something that exists as construed.

There is no behaviour, intention, preference, or value that exists independently of the relations in which it is actualised.

Evolutionary history fails this test.

No agent encounters:

  • a selection pressure,

  • a fitness payoff,

  • or an ancestral adaptive problem

as a lived or meaningful phenomenon.

These belong to explanatory theory, not to experience.

When evolutionary psychology treats such abstractions as causes of present action, it substitutes a non-phenomenal explanation for a phenomenal one.

4. Why Nothing Exists Prior to Its Relational Actualisation

Relational ontology begins from a simple but demanding commitment:

there is no phenomenon prior to its actualisation in relation.

Systems are not containers of behaviour. They are theories of possible instances.

Instantiation is not a temporal pipeline from past to present. It is a perspectival cut—an act of construal that brings a phenomenon into being as what it is.

Evolutionary psychology inverts this logic. It treats past selection as if it were already the phenomenon, waiting to be expressed.

What this misses is precisely the present:

  • the social relations,

  • the symbolic structures,

  • the institutional contexts

through which any behaviour becomes intelligible at all.

5. How the Error Propagates

Once constraints are mistaken for constitutive causes, several things follow automatically:

  • present relations are downgraded to mere triggers,

  • social and symbolic systems become secondary overlays,

  • explanation runs backward rather than outward.

Behaviour is no longer something to be understood in context, but something to be traced back to an origin story.

The result is an account that explains behaviour everywhere except where it occurs.

Conclusion: Putting Explanation Back Where It Belongs

This critique does not deny biology. It repositions it.

Biology constrains what can be actualised. It does not constitute what is actualised.

Evolutionary psychology collapses this distinction, granting historical abstraction the ontological role of present explanation.

From a relational perspective, that move is illegitimate.

Until constraint and constitution are cleanly distinguished, evolutionary explanations will continue to feel intuitively satisfying while remaining ontologically misplaced.

In the next post, we will examine the most prominent device through which this misplacement is sustained: the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness and the myth of explanatory history.

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