The problematic concrete individual implied by scientific realism

According to Arocha’s (2021) scientific realism, the concrete individual is real and knowable, and the aim of science is to develop theories and to test hypotheses to generate objective knowledge. Psychological researchers, as a result, should focus more on the real concrete individual, rather than on aggregate statistical data. Moreover, the final cause, that is, the purpose or the intention of an individual should be regarded as the essential component in understanding individual psychology. In this way, Arocha claims, researchers can overcome the limitations of the standard approach to research. The Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) and Observation-Oriented Modeling (OOM) are two examples used by Arocha to illustrate the feasibility of his scientific realism.

Arocha’s (2021) critique gives researchers an insightful perspective on how we can understand human behavior in alternative ways based on the concrete individual. The concrete individual, however, is not concrete in themselves, but is dependent on the concrete meaning of their final cause. Though claimed to be the research focus, the final cause is taken for granted with some prespecified content in Arocha’s recommended new approaches. In PCT the perceptual reference signal (some desired state of a perception, a want, etc.) is predetermined without further discussion about its sources. Arocha takes driving to work as an example from everyday life. According to PCT, the goal to perceive oneself at one’s place of work is the reference signal. Researchers can observe whether this reference signal is valid or not through experimentation. The reason why people have to go to work and what effects driving has on them, however, cannot be addressed by PCT. By the same token, within OOM, the study of the self also needs to commit itself to one prespecified pattern of the self. In Arocha’s article, a consistent self-image is taken as an illustration of the use of OOM, that is, the individual tends to maintain a perception of themself that is consistent with their self-image. On the basis of this hypothesis, after imagining someone who knew them well challenged their self-relevant traits, the individual is more inclined to correct these challenging statements. As described, the consistent self-image is taken for granted without further discussion. The sources of this taken-for-granted pattern of the self, however, are suspended and cannot be addressed by OOM on its own. The validity of OOM is thus limited to discerning whether one particular self-pattern exists. It is not able to answer the question of why people have this specific self-pattern and what impact it has on the individual’s life.

To summarize, Arocha’s recommended methods take a specific final cause for granted without reason. The validity of these methods is limited to dealing with whether the final cause really takes effect. It is beyond the scope of these methods to address the sources of the final cause. Without a deeper understanding of the sources, however, the individual with a final cause is an abstraction. Hence, the methods of scientific realism may contribute little to understanding the reasons people think and behave as they do.

This makes Arocha’s (2021) recommended new approaches an incomplete means to study the concrete individual he suggests. We suggest that psychological researchers should take historical relations into consideration, that is, to place individuals into their concrete historical relations, from which the sources of the final cause come.

Humans are biological beings who purposively produce food, their environments, and the whole of their being; they must reproduce as well. This is done in specific geographic places and temporal eras, using habits and technologies and frames of thought developed over historical periods. More fundamentally, thought is determined by the historical context in which it is produced: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men [sic], the language of real life” (Marx, 1932/2000, p. 180). In this sense, Marx’s concept of history does not refer to a generalized dimension or background of time, but contains a specific definition at the ontological level:

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production as the basis of all history. (Marx, 1932/2000, p. 188)

Asserting the primacy of the mode of production, Marx explains all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness and traces their origins and growth from this basis. Further, in contrast to the idealistic view of history, he does not look for a ready-made category (“the concrete individual,” for instance) so much as he emphasizes the mode of production as the real ground of history. It is the latter which prescribes for the “category” its conditions and “gives it a definite development, a special character” (Marx, 1932/2000, p. 189).

Take the case of driving to work: historical relations shaped by the capitalist mode of production, such as the surplus desire that recognizes cars as a symbol of social status and personal taste, the mobility culture, the marketing strategy of the car company, and the layout of the modern city are all among the sources of why people want to drive to work. The same goes for the conception of the consistent self-image. It is a product of modern social relations by which people can live independently from each other. In modern society, it is natural to speculate that each individual needs to maintain their consistent self-image. But it is also possible to imagine a society in which people focus more on a consistent family image, taking the East-Asian society (which sometimes debatably alludes to the so-called “Asiatic Mode of Production”), for example. In this alternative type of society, the individual is subordinate to the family, which causes the family to play a more important role than does the individual in the shaping of one’s self-image (Yang, 2006). Consequently, the individual in East-Asian society is given “a definite development, a special character” (Marx, 1932/2000, p. 189). They may tend less to maintain self-relevant traits and more to maintain family-relevant traits.

Many researchers have expressed such a similar historically informed method. Marx (1857/1973) proposed that the concrete is concrete not because it is governed by its own laws, but because it is the concentration of many specific historical relations. To study the concrete, as a result, is not to find its universal abstract laws, but to start from simple, abstract concepts to their appearances within specific historical relations, namely, rising from the abstract to the concrete.

Gergen (1973) has argued that theories of social behavior are primarily reflections of contemporary history. For this reason, to study social psychology is to study contemporary history systematically. Kim et al. (2006) outlined the methodology of Indigenous and cultural psychology, advocating that the seemingly universal knowledge should be examined in specific familial, social, cultural, and ecological contexts. Ratner (2006) suggested psychological researchers should take specific historical social institutions, cultural artifacts, and cultural concepts into account.

The historically informed method regards the concrete individual as embedded in their specific historical relations. To study the concrete individual is not to abstract them from the concrete reality and conceive of them as relatively independent and ruled by their own laws, but to regard them as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. That is, to incorporate the individual in the concrete social, economic, and historical reality on which they depend and by whose laws they are ruled (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2020). Thus, researchers can get a richer and more comprehensive understanding of the concrete individual.

In summary, the problem with Arocha’s (2021) recommended methods lies in his overemphasis on the concrete individual. However, the methods (PCT and OOM) he appeals to on many occasions are apt to translate a given psychological phenomenon of interest into a set of operations that define the variables’ meaning, and then manipulate or test them in subsequent experiments. This fails to explain the reason and the context of the phenomenon. If researchers do not question the problematic concrete individual and take an historical perspective on psychology, we will still be trapped in traditional psychology, regarding the ready-made individual as the unquestionable ground and failing to grasp the historical character of their experience. This would limit the scope of psychology, hindering researchers from understanding concrete individuals situated in their specific historical relations.