 and resistance. Completely Darwinian socio-evolution implies a voluntarism of social practices; complete Lamarckism, a determinism of social processes. Moreover, from a transcendental standpoint this side of infinity—that is, on the one hand, this side of utopia and on the other, of extinction, i.e. within human history—social adaptation can be neither total nor nil. So we need a theory of the interinfluence of relatively independent M- and S-conditions, and of the dialectic of adjustment and tension, accommodation and subversion between form of life and setting. Both requisites call for a theory of agency—or more precisely of agents (their classes, relations, interests, etc.)—as the mediating link between selecting environments and mutating practices. A third disanalogy, the possibility of multiple and conflicting criteria, has already been noted. But this only carries ontological force inasmuch as the differential criteria are or might be acted upon. i.e. in virtue of the activity- and concept-dependence of ‘memetic’,55 in contrast to genetic, codes. Together these differentiae restore the practical, conceptual, totalising and critical tasks of the socio-evolutionary, in contrast to the bioevolutionary, 53. K.Marx, The Holy Family, Selected Writings, ed. T.Bottomore and M. Rubel, Harmondsworth 1963, p. 75. 54. Cf. S.Toulmin, Human Understanding Vol. 1, Oxford 1973, p. 338 55. R.Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, pp. 206 ff.
100 scientific realism and human ­emancipation sciences. But this leads on to a fourth disanalogy: that in the social world alone functionality, insofar as it becomes a project of social-political action for human agents, need not be just a gloss. That is to say (β), the functional gloss on the dispositional power (see p. 142 above), can be reflexively incorporated into any mechanism of social change. For fit, or the lack of it, matters to people—whether in the cognitive medium of incoherent narratives; in the communicative medium of thwarted intentionality; or in the great practical media of unfulfilled possibilities, frustrated needs, unwanted determinations and oppressive relations. Each of these can become, in specific circumstances, the object of a transformative praxis. Only in the human sphere does historicity enter, as a material force with an efficacy of its own, into history. Only here is history written (or told); and made as well as done. For only here is experienced the hope that history, conceived as the understanding of the past, can be reflexively incorporated into our experience of history as the enactment of the present and so inform history as the process of the production of our future, already shaped and conditioned, ramified and constrained, but still unselected, open, yet to be made.
The Limits of the Evolutionary Analogue Pursuing the implications of the gene-theoretic elaboration of the M/S framework, Harré has suggested that the social analogues of genes (replicators) and organisms (interactors) are rules and practices respectively.56 Without offering any detailed justification here, I want to propose the following alternative interpretation of the model: lineage = history = temporal sequence of replicators replicator = social structure interactor1 = practice/institution interactor2 = agent environment = ensemble of interactors1, embedded in biosphere. I prefer the category of social structure to that of rule, both because only causally efficacious rules are replicators and because social replication always involves resources as well as rules (memetic matter as well as form). I distinguish two types of social interactor (and a fortiori, collectives): practices are generated by social structures, but it is through the medium of human agency that selection pressure operates. Accordingly, I distinguish two types of individuating narrative, corresponding to the longue durée of institutions and the biographies of individuals. (See Diagram 2.13 and compare with Diagram 2.10 on p. 130 above). In the social case the mode of replication is activity (and so interactor1 and 2-dependent); but the mode of reproduction of the population (of practices) is the very process of copying, the mode of replication of the social structure (memetic order) itself. A species is a naturally self-producing system. But society is neither naturally produced nor self-reproducing. So if the R/I format is not to lapse into reductionism (memes as genes) or reification (memes as self-reproducing), it must presuppose the T.M.S.A., i.e. human agency as the medium and vehicle of reproduction, without of course seeing replication as its consciously intended outcome. As Harré has pointed out ‘all populational theories conceive of change as defined 56. See R.Harré, ‘The Evolutionary Analogy in Social Evolution’, eds. U. Jensen and R.Harré, op. cit.
57. Cf. R.Harré, Social Being, Oxford 1979, p. 368. The disanalogies between socio- and bio-evolution which Harré notes throws the transformational character of the social process into heightened relief. For such phenomena as non-simple lineage ordering, replicative innovation, selection on replicators, causal interaction between replicators, direct causal relations between interactors1, Lamarckism and reinforcement all turn on the activity- or concept-dependence of social evolution. 58. Cf. A.Kenny, Freedom, Will and Power, Oxford 1975, pp. 48 ff. This definition of needs will be broadened in § 5.
Critical naturalism and the dialectic of human emancipation 103 selection criteria—criteria of adaptiveness—are brought to consciousness, subject to critical scrutiny and themselves more or less transformed. When unreflected processes are rendered amenable to conscious control, we are free to fulfil our natures. Human history is faster, more interconnected and complex, praxis- and conceptdependent and value-impregnated than biological history (some of these differences are relative, some appear absolute). Biological time is itself a fleeting now in the longer curve of natural history, in turn a flash of light in the hollow sound of eternity. Some, but not all, human history can be modelled on a populational schema which (i) respects the interdependence of social replication and interaction and social selection and mutation and (ii) presupposes, in its elaboration of the mode of connection between adaptive (and non-adaptive) features and their historical consequences, a transformational and relational view of social activity. If this is done, social ‘evolution’ will take on a new meaning, just as ‘mass’ has done in twentieth century physics, as the model gradually severs its connection with its parent-source and comes to acquire an autonomous life of its own. That said, it is important to remember that much human history just is (and will always be) natural history, both in the sense that the human species is evolving biologically, and in the sense that the natural and social life of the species is continually subject to the determinations of our ecological environment, in which we have been lately so dramatically intervening.
4. The Problems of Topology, Conceptuality and Critique Anyone who sets out in this field to hunt down final and ultimate truths …will bring home little, apart from platitudes and commonplaces of the sorriest kind: for example, that generally speaking men cannot live except by labour; that up to the present they have been divided into rulers and ruled; that Napoleon died on May 5th 1821, and so on.59 59. F.Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1969, p. 109.
104 scientific realism and human ­emancipation The T.M.S.A. immediately generates two interconnected problems, which bear on the themes of structural, integrative pluralism (IP) and of multiple, holistic and mixed determinations discussed in §1, viz.: (1) how are the social practices to be identified, and especially individuated?; and (2) how are the individuated practices to be interlaced or intricated (e.g. should one attempt to incorporate them within a unified explanatory scheme such as historical materialism purports to provide?) The problem of individuation may be broached, as we shall see, by reference to agents’ own accounting procedures, but agents may lack (especially in the contingent historical context of a systematically atomising society) any clear conception of the interrelations between their activities.
Diagram 2.13: N.B. The levels R, I2 [Io], I are not in one-to-one correspondence Integrative Pluralism indicates that here again we need to be able to think the simultaneity of distinctions and connections, so that the various practices are conceived as non-identical but causally, and possibly internally, related to one another. And once more it becomes mandatory to insist in principle against both monism, whether in essentialist or reductionist guise, which would scout the differentiation of the practices, and eclecticism or pluralism, whether or an empiricist, rationalist (e.g. structuralist) or idealist sort, which would efface their interconnections. In its most general form, this issue is a problem for any human historiography at three main levels: (1) within human ecology; (2) within social science; and (3) within some particular social scientific explanatory scheme such as historical materialism, where it is of course familiar as the problem of reconciling the notion of the relative autonomy of the superstructures (repudiating monism) with that of their ultimate determination by the economic base (rejecting eclecticism). At level