Scientific realism and the historical emergence of consciousness

In “Scientific Realism and the Issue of Variability in Behavior,” J. F. Arocha (2021) proposes a (hylo)-realist method of studying behaviour and consciousness (p. 377) as an alternative to the dominant positivistic methodology. Arocha criticizes positivism in psychology for reducing “science to the observable sphere” (p. 377) and employing abstract concepts only to the extent that they are immediately tied to empirical operations. Positivism also, falsely, conceives of the degree of maturation of a science not in terms of developing and deploying proper concepts but in terms of an indeterminate application of quantitative operations and methods.

Arocha’s (2021) hylorealist method, which shares the general realist ontological and epistemological assumptions with other realist tendencies such as scientific realism, adopts the thesis that reality consists of concrete (determinate) things, is orderly and lawful, and that it has an emergent character: reality is made of different layers that are governed by laws irreducible to those governing “lower” layers. I propose that furthering the critical power of the realist position requires the adoption of the thesis that human societies also have emergent properties and are determined by historically specific laws; therefore, a concrete scientific study of consciousness is conceivable only with reference to historically determinate social forms that amount to the constitution of concrete individuals—consciousness as a social relation. In the absence of such historical–cultural conceptualization of consciousness, the realist project fails to fully actualize its critical potential and retreats to the positivistic–abstract position it tends to criticize.

Society is an emergent entity; it is a new realm of reality and thus has its own specific laws. Therefore, society is a “concrete” thing consisting of real, essential relations between diverse phenomena—a totality of apparently diverse facts. Roy Bhashkar (2005) states that “only if social phenomena are genuinely emergent . . . realist explanations in the human sciences are justified” (p. 69). The possibility of a science of society and social phenomena, consciousness included, is based on the emergent nature of these realms; although these higher levels emerge on the basis of lower levels of reality, they are subject to specific laws not derivable from the laws of those lower levels As Bhashkar (2005) puts it:

In its most general sense, a property possessed by an entity at a certain level of organisation may be said to be emergent from some lower level insofar as it is not predictable from the properties found at that level. More specifically . . . although social phenomena are conditioned by and dependent upon and only materially manifest in natural phenomena, they are nevertheless not only taxonomically, but causally, and so ontologically (as well as epistemologically), irreducible to them. (p. 60, n. 1)

Society is irreducible to the sum of individuals, though its existence depends also on their being and activity. Human beings and their activity are, by definition, social (human beings, specifically with the emergence of capitalism, become truly social animals); so are the particular forms of their activities such as perception and cognition. The social makeup of human activity, perception and cognition included, is manifest in, is strengthened by, and gives way to human language. It is with the emergence of language that human consciousness attains its specifically human form; language yields concepts, which in turn bestow “meaning” onto, or “extract” and “express” the meaning of specific elements of reality. To have meaning is to be made into a tool—by being abstracted from its immediate environment a mere object is tuned into a tool; it is posited as an element of an organized unity, acquires social significance, and thus emerges as an “ideal”—which not only is applicable within the system this particular meaningfulness is a part of, but is also applicable within other systems and engulfs newer areas of reality and newer significances. The individual consciousness emerges only within this web of social relations. Marx (1845/2010) draws attention to this aspect of human consciousness when he defines “human essence” as not an “abstraction inherent in each single individual” but as an “ensemble of the social relations” (p. 4). Accordingly, the definition of human essence cannot be reached by enumerating the apparently common features of members of a community. Rather, human society is to be conceived of as a historically emergent, concrete, that is, historically determined entity, of which the human individual is an instantiation.

A realist psychology—or a science of psychology that works from within a realist paradigm—has the concrete individual as its subject of study. Concreteness of the individual does not consist of its being an entity the physical boundaries of which can be drawn against others—such “concreteness” would not amount to more than Weber’s individual, which is a “naturally” given, ahistorical, indeterminate, and thus abstract entity that is related to society externally, where society, in turn, is conceived of as an indeterminate, randomly formed crowd consisting of abstract individuals. The concreteness of the individual signifies its being a member of society: society is a reality that transcends its individual members. It precedes them as a totality that consists of accumulated human experience. This experience includes all human artefacts—physical and ideal—as well as practices, that is, the mode of production as a historically emerging totality. Yet, society is subject to change and transformation because it is not an actuality independent from the activities of its members—it is reproduced and transformed on the basis of such activity. Although an abstract transhistorical character may be attributed to human activity (praxis, production, labour), in reality activity is historically specific and so is the society within which human activity takes place. As Marx and Engels (1845/2010, p. 31) also emphasize, human social activity (and labour as its height) always assumes a definite historical form. Given the role of labour in the emergence of human consciousness and its appearance as a truly social entity (zoon politikon), the individual consciousness as the curvature of the social attains a specific historical form—it is historically determinate and thus is concrete. This concreteness is manifest, determined, and actualized in specific forms in relation to the type of artefacts and tools through which human activity is realized; these tools and artefacts include abstracting and thinking tools deployed for manipulating cognitive activity, the external world, and the internal world of emotions (conceptual systems, material tools of action, and works of art). As Bhashkar (2011) aptly put it:

People, in their conscious human activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce (or occasionally, transform) the structures that govern their substantive activities of production. Thus people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family, or work to reproduce the capitalist economy. But it is nevertheless the unintended consequence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also the necessary condition for, their activity. (p. 63)

Criticizing “random variable assumption” advocated by Georg Rasch, Arocha (2021) draws attention to this social specificity of individual behaviour when stating that the high level of consistency of human behaviour in daily social life will be unexplainable on the basis of the idea of haphazardness of human behaviour (p. 380). Individual behaviour should be considered in relation to its social form, which in turn concerns use of socially produced tools for actualization of behaviour and the “ideal” laws behaviour has to abide by for its realization, the task it is supposed to realize (its goal). Behaviour—activity—is always a concrete, determinate behaviour.

In defining consciousness as the fundamental subject of investigation of the science of psychology, Vygotsky (1997a) identifies the incapability of, in his own time, mainstream psychology to set the boundary between human and animal psychology as a major defect (p. 64). In this way, biology takes over sociology and psychology and the unique character of human activity in contradistinction to animals’ reactive behaviour is dismissed. Human behaviour is not “natural” but sociohistorical in that it is not constituted in immediate response to natural stimuli but in response to socially produced impetuses (social artefacts such as physical and psychological tools, language, and other forms of ideal instruments; in short the totality of social relations and connections) that mediate human (productive) activity in nature. Human productive activity not only produces the object, but also the consumer; it not only produces the need but also the subject of the need. As Marx (1993), in relation to art as a specific form of human productive activity, states: “The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object” (p. 92). Production creates the material of consumption, the manner of consuming the product (behaviour) and the need or inclination toward the product, which in turn amounts to formation of intentional behaviour. It is in this sense that “behaviour can only be understood as history of behaviour” (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 88); this is so because it is possible and actualizable only within such a social web through deployment of (psychological) tools. In fact, every activity, to the extent that it deploys tools, can be understood only as the history of that activity—as historical activity or activity in history; it can be conceived of only through the history of developments of its tools—history here does not refer to mere chronological order of appearance of tools of activity, rather it points toward the interrelation of tools (in response) to totality of social needs. Thus follows the sociohistorical specificity of individual consciousness as a social relation that is also manifest in the dual appearance of higher mental functions and higher forms of behaviour on the scene: “first as a collective form of behavior, as an inter-psychological function, then as an intra-psychological function, as a certain way of behaving” (Vygotsky, 1997c, p. 95). Hence, the historically specific form of mental functions and capacities constituted in the course of historical development of human species and the consequent form of emergent human consciousness. Reconstitution of psychology as a mature science on the basis of a realist paradigm capable of developing and deploying proper concepts (Arocha, 2021) is not possible in any way other than rejecting “the older psychology’s philosophical foundations” (Vygotsky, 1997d, p. 112). The latter is not attainable unless the historical specificity and the consequent social form of the conditions and laws governing the social totality on the basis of which the individual consciousness emerges are admitted and brought to the centre of psychological investigation.