Generalizations,concepts,and pseudoconcepts: The subjective content of epistemic violence

Barbara S. Held (2020) argues that “the for/about prepositional divide [presumed by Indigenous psychology] is conceptually fuzzy” (p. 351) so that “folk” concepts (concepts from-below) do not necessarily contribute to progressive goals in science, nor do from-above (made by scientists) concepts necessarily contribute to the conservative goals of mainstream science, guilty of epistemic violence. Held’s argument is constructed at two levels: empirical and philosophical–theoretical (epistemological) analyses of the concept of “race.” Held argues that both the folk and expert concepts of race contribute to “racial essentialism.” Thus, she shows that there is no Great Wall of China that strictly separates the from-below concepts from the from-above concepts. I argue that Held’s position can be further supported psychologically and epistemologically with reference to (a) Lev Vygotsky’s (1987) analysis of the relation between “spontaneous” and “scientific” concepts and the development of concepts in school children and (b) with reference to Evald Ilyenkov’s (2007, 2010, 2012, 2017) analysis of concepts versus notions (mere generalizations or pseudoconcepts).

In Chapter 6 of Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky (1987) argues that (a) scientific concepts have a unique path of development that is the opposite of the line of development of everyday concepts, (b) similar to everyday concepts they develop too, (c) they are also given in an incomplete form, (d) the laws of their development are different from the everyday concepts, and (e) yet, the two interact to the effect that the acquisition of scientific concepts accelerates the development of spontaneous concepts (pp. 167–168). In opposition to everyday concepts, “the development of scientific concepts begins with the verbal definition”; these concepts, then, descend to the concrete, that is, they acquire content. “In contrast, the everyday concept tends to develop outside any definite system; it tends to move upwards toward abstraction and generalization” (p. 168). Eventually, with the development of higher mental functions and the constitution of a conceptual framework, a merger between these two sets of concepts takes place. On this basis, I argue that the “Indigenous” and “critical-cum-Indigenous” psychologies that contrast the “from-above” and the “from-below” have an ahistorical conception of (both scientific and everyday) concepts and inevitably essentialize and ontologize both the (mainstream) scientific practice and the folk culture and their consequent corresponding conceptual frameworks.

One particular shortcoming of some “Indigenous” psychologies is their naturalistic understanding of the processes of concept acquisition and concept formation. Apparently, they ascribe too much weight and importance to the “natural” and accidental acquisition of concepts at the price of excluding the teaching process. Knowledge, in such views, is a product of particular “language games” in which language is embedded in a culture, the “indigenous philosophies and concepts” of which should be used “to generate theories of global discourse” (Task Force on Indigenous Psychology, n.d., para. 2, point 4), that is, to produce alternative, authentic language games capable of competing with dominant “Western” language games. Like all naturalist approaches that also romanticize the “folk,” “grass roots,” or “own culture,” they intend to “exaggerate the distance between instruction and development” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 171) and consider (“Western”) scientific and folk concepts and the processes of thinking corresponding to each as mutually exclusive and antagonistic. Methodologically, Indigenous psychology’s understanding of folk concepts is reminiscent of, among others, Piaget’s naturalistic stance, which considers the process of education of children as the process of systematic deformation of the child’s mind by adults. (It should be added that I am not making a parallel between science and adults, on the one side, and children and Indigenous peoples, on the other; rather, I aim to show the methodological affinities between Piagetian and folk psychologies, which is rooted in their naturalism.) “In accordance with [Piaget’s] theory, development is reduced to a continual conflict between antagonistic forms of thinking; it is reduced to the establishment of a unique compromise between these two forms of thinking at each stage in the developmental process” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 175). In this view, science appears as an ideological apparatus where, once the ideational products of which are internalized, the human subject (the “ordinary” individual) is posited as a personality that bears “ideological” (false) consciousness. The relation between “natural,” “Indigenous” individuals and the “scientific”–ideological apparatuses is defined as one-way; the apparatuses determine, the individuals are determined and deformed. Whereas in reality, the process of acquisition of concepts by both the child and the adult is not an automatic process based on mere imitation and appropriation of ready-made structures and memorization of scientific terminology. Just as is the case with everyday spontaneous concepts, the human individual has to work out these concepts as well. It is exactly this working out of concepts, spontaneous and scientific, that amounts to the formation of consciousness as well as production of meaning, which functions as the source of expansion of concept. The aforementioned naturalism of Indigenous psychologies is rooted and reflected in their conceptions of folk, Indigenous culture, which, unintentionally, amount to the reproduction of “culture” as a transhistorical, static entity that externally determines its individual members. For instance, Christopher et al. (2014) define culture as being “central to human experience” (p. 645) and as “meanings and practices that are shared by a social group and constitutive of a way of life” (p. 647), yet do not provide an argument for how culture, as a temporal entity, is constituted. Notwithstanding the romanticization and naturalization of culture that amounts to an uncritical promotion of the so-called folk concepts and meanings, such as “the strictures of segregation by caste, religion, and sex that underpin local social organizations and stratification” (p. 646), which, allegedly, are constitutive of individual members of a culture. The sources of these meanings, how they are produced, and how they determine ways of life also remain enigmas.

Some Indigenous psychology proponents dismiss that linguistically constructed terms and concepts are produced through historically specific forms of life activity that constitute the “common cultural heritage” of human societies and that the meaning and content of these concepts are continuously reconstituted. For instance, attempting to ground psychology in culture, Sundararajan (2014) calls “Yin and Yang, a Chinese [emphasis added] principle of metaphysics” (p. 71), dismissing that “China” refers to a modern political geography that has not much in common with ancient China other than the name or that “metaphysics” has a different meaning even from ancient Greek “metaphysics,” just as the “atom” of contemporary theoretical physics is qualitatively different from Democritus’ atom.

Systems of beliefs, literature, folk narratives, even jests and legends are among the constituents of common heritage. The production of such heritage, nowadays, has become more intense owing to the widespread exchange of thoughts and ideas among educated masses through written and oral media. The produced shared knowledge has amounted to the construction of a common cultural memory that not only provides the scientific establishment with the necessary material for constituting scientific conceptual systems and knowledge, but also immediately contributes to the growth of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, production of scientific concepts does not happen in a conceptual void but is actualized in response to already existing conceptual frameworks, which draw on both spontaneously produced concepts and terms and scientific conceptual systems. Scientific knowledge production and the consequent concepts do not simply coexist peacefully with spontaneous ones; rather, they appropriate the spontaneously produced concepts as “free gifts” and subsume them as their own functions just as, ontogenetically, newly formed higher mental functions, say, conceptual memory, turn the biologically given mental functions, say, biological memory, into functions of themselves. Moreover, similar to the ontogenesis of concepts and the formation of individual consciousness, at the social level the process of spontaneous concept formation is determined by institutionalized (scientific) forms of knowledge production. Social institutions of knowledge production, on the one hand, tend to stabilize and standardize the socially produced knowledge (concepts), while on the other hand, they regulate the expansion of meaning (the content of concepts) by appropriating the surplus-meaning produced both within and without institutionalized production (Azeri, in press). In this regard, Held quite correctly states that “the for/about prepositional divide is conceptually fuzzy, especially in the way that epistemic violence attributed to from-above mainstream science often enough depends on folk notions from below” (2020, p. 351).

Pertaining to Ilyenkov’s distinction between mere notions and concepts, I argue that the aforementioned ahistorical attitude of “Indigenous” psychology is based on an epistemological presumption that equates notions with concepts and considers concepts as linguistic empirical inductive generalizations. Such a view is based on the uncritically commonsensical understanding that reduces concepts to the lexical meaning or the sense of the word (Ilyenkov, 2017, pp. 42–43). Concepts, both as linguistic units and as constituents of scientific theories, are different from words. Teo’s (2018, p. 91) demand from the sciences for using concepts based on “everyday experiences” instead of the from-above, dominant concepts and theories (Held, 2020, p. 353) is an example of confusing concepts and mere notions, notwithstanding the vagueness of the meaning of the term “concept” as it is used by Teo. Thanks to its historicity, a concept acquires a multiplicity of meanings and its consequent ambiguity creates room for multiple interpretations, albeit contradictory ones, which thus amounts to discursive turbulence and becomes historically conspicuous. A word, with its meaning being fixed, is devoid of such a historical role (Booeker, 1998, pp. 54–55). Ignoring the historicity and dynamism of concepts leads to understanding concepts as ossified entities that have unchangeable meanings for every alleged member of a “culture.” Such a stance further disregards that “the road between folk and scientific conceptions runs both ways” (Held, 2020, p. 357) and that the relation between the two sets of concepts is not simply displacement of one by the other.

Following Ilyenkov (2012, 2017), I define concepts as the reconstruction of essential relations between diverse phenomena that amounts to ideal reconstruction of their common generic root. Such conceptualization of concepts “compels one to distinguish most strictly between what is essential for the subject [emphasis added] (his [sic] desires, aspirations, goals, etc.) and what is essential for the objective definition of the nature of the object entirely independent of the subjective aspirations [emphasis added]” (Ilyenkov, 2017, p. 50). The use of the concept of “race” in both mainstream and folk psychologies that is assessed by Held reveals a fundamental common aspect of the two: inability to transcend the phenomenal due to reducing a concept, in this particular case “race,” into apparent common features of members of a set. Held quotes Leslie, stating that “If even just a few members of a kind possess a property that is harmful or dangerous, then a generic that attributes that property to the kind is likely to be judged true” (as cited in Held, 2020, p. 361). Hamilton et al. are quoted emphasizing the role of essentialization of groups as highly uniform in attributing negative stereotypes to members of those groups (as cited in Held, 2020, p. 361). Smith is also quoted underlining the role of racial essentialism in “perceiving” uniformity within a racially essentialized group (as cited in Held, 2020, p. 357). It is clear that such generalizations are based on “apparent” similarities that do not aim to reveal the common generic root of diverse phenomena, that is, the unity in difference. Race, perhaps, is one such generalization. Racialization begins with, but also sticks into, the phenomenal. The commonsensical view draws the “essence” from the appearance (explains the essence via phenomenon); whereas it is the essence, which is reconstructed ideally in the concept as the common generic root of seemingly diverse phenomena, that is capable of explaining the phenomenal. It goes without saying that such racial essentialism that draws on apparent similarities among the members of a group and the “differences” between different groups is no less pervasive in folk psychology and folk beliefs. Held quotes Smith stating that “when ‘people use racial labels,’ they implicitly believe that members of each race are instances of a ‘discrete natural human kind . . . in virtue of possessing a “deep” [inalienable] essence that is responsible for the surface characteristics that are taken to be typical of the kind’” (as cited in Held, 2020, p. 362).

Thus, it can be concluded that epistemic violence is not caused by endorsing the from-above concepts and cannot be remedied by merely replacing them with folk concepts; rather, it is caused by the absence of proper scientific concepts and passing off subjectively inspired generalizations (pseudoconcepts) that entail prejudices of every kind as genuine concepts. Epistemologically, ignoring such distinctions amounts to obliterating the boundary between the objective and the subjective and reducing concepts to a projection of subjective desires, which in turn necessarily brings about relativism—a position that Held brilliantly shows to be self-defeating (2020, pp. 354–355).