Neo-Boasianism,a form of critical structural realism: It’s better than the alternative

Epistemology

Science underwent unparalleled criticism in the 20th century. Some now insist, as does Tyler, that science itself is ‘archaic’. The quotation above from Bertrand Russell, one of the 20th-century’s greatest epistemologists, was written towards the end of his life, and reflected his understanding of the import of these attacks. His rhetoric is restrained, even deflationary. Science was not ‘quite right’, but it was ‘better’ than the ‘unscientific’ alternative. This view of science underlies critical structural theory.

Epistemologically, CSR accepts scientific realism; that is, it recognizes there is a real world; that social and cultural phenomena are just as real as any other phenomena; and that science provides approximately true accounts of reality. Boyd (2002) succinctly reviews and refutes the various cases against scientific realism. Extended defense of realism involving critiques of arguments against it are made in Boyd (1984), Leplin (1997), McMullin (1984), Niiniluoto (2004), Psillos (2005) and Sokal (2008). Two points need to be emphasized. First, remember that Immanuel Kant famously insisted ‘Reality is something’ (1781: 207, emphasis in the original). However, he rejected that reality, insofar as we can know it, could be independent of the concepts by which we grasp it. In this sense it is a ‘mind-affected’ world (Dilthey 1962: 67). But, and this is crucial, the mind is nothing else than the human brain in operation. The brain is ‘something’ in reality like any other material ‘something’. So to say we cannot know reality independently of our ideas of it is equivalent to asserting that something real (the brain) is needed to know other things real, which in no way violates realism. Second, realism does not deny that individuals or groups of individuals can view reality in different and unreal ways. In fact, enormous numbers of peoples, in enormous numbers of ways, affirm different and untrue opinions. This actuality does not in any way mean that it is impossible to distinguish truer from falser knowledge. Let us turn now to science, to grasp why it has, in Russell’s words, ‘a better chance of being right’ than non-scientific approaches.

Scientific accounts are those in which there is theoretical knowledge based on validation of an explanation’s, or an interpretation’s, approximate truth about something or things in reality. Validation is the making of observations to judge if what a theory’s generalizations state goes on in reality is actually observed to go on. If what happens is observed to be what a generalization says it is to be then the generalization is said to be approximately true. Postmodernists, for the most part, having sworn off ‘archaic’ science, abjure validation, ² in part because they deny ‘the possibility of truth’ (Lyotard 1984 [1978]) because they see it as ‘either meaningless or arbitrary’ (Culler 1982: 22).

Since the 1950s there have been two spasms of science wars. Science Wars I occurred in the early 1960s, following publication of CP Snow’s Two Cultures (2001 [1959]), in which he announced that two intellectual, scientific and literary cultures had emerged in the 20th century. He further said the two cultures did not understand each other (something of an understatement) and – taking the scientific side – suggested that the literati had fascist tendencies, pointing to the Nazi flirtations of Yeats, Pound, and Wyndham-Lewis. Fighting words, Culture Wars II might be understood as the literati’s response that started in the late 1960s. There have been four general categories of response: those of post-positivist philosophy of science, of post-modernism, of the social constructivist studies of science, and of feminism. The judgments of post-positivist philosophers of science – importantly, Willard Quine, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend – were made by philosophers with expertise in induction, logic, and particular branches of science. Postmodern views on science come from postmodern philosophers (François Lyotard, Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, and Deleuze and Guattari). Social constructivist work in science studies (importantly Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour) and certain areas of feminist theory (especially Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller) share similarities with postmodern and social constructivist positions. Taken together, these four sets of criticisms can be said to those on the anti-science side in the second of the science wars to erupt since the 1950s. Certainly science can be deeply influenced by social phenomena, and that one aspect of this influence is that it has been a patriarchal enterprise. However, the decisive point is that none of the critiques of science ‘has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting’ science (Boghossian 2007: 131). Science’s detractors, as I have shown in an earlier work (Reyna 1994), raise concerns about the limitations of scientific knowledge, but none offer superior alternatives.

Furthermore, since the 1990s the criticisms of science have themselves been critiqued. Imre Lakatos (1970) and Larry Laudan (1976) respectively defended science as the evolution of what they termed research ‘programs’ or ‘traditions’. More recently Susan Haack (2003), Philip Kitcher (1993), John Zammito (2004), Paul Boghossian (2006), and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) have provided more technical defenses of science.

Consider that some supposed critiques of science are simply not critiques. Sandra Harding wrote in The Science Question in Feminism that science’s ‘modes of defining research problems and designing experiments, its way of constructing and conferring meanings are not only sexist but also racist, classist, and culturally coercive’ (1986: 9). However, a reading of both Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that they believe a feminist science would remove problems of the sexism, class bias, and coerciveness of scientists. As Keller put it, speaking of the intentions of her work, ‘I wanted to see a “gender-free” science’ (2004: 6). As I read Harding and Keller, they are not so much against science but believe there are non-scientific social and cultural factors that inhibit its performance. Similarly, social constructivists, like Barnes, Bloor and Henry, do not see themselves as anti-science. Rather, they see themselves as providing a scientific understanding of science itself, one that seeks to ‘honor science by imitation’ (1996: viii). Attention turns to post-positivist philosophers of science critiques of science.

There have been three general criticisms of science. The first of these is the thesis of underdetermination of theory by evidence, associated with Quine (1960), reviving Pierre Duhem’s (1981 [1906]) older position, which argued that the content of scientific theory is always greater than its set of empirically confirmable consequences – which implies that theories, however testable, are never absolutely validated. Quine’s thesis has not gone unchallenged (see especially Brown 2001: 162–166; Leplin 1997: 153–163; Kitcher 1993: 250; Boghossian 2006: 119–122). Critically, the thesis does not argue that there is anything wrong with validation per se. What it does assert, against the positivism of those like Auguste Comte, is that validation is never absolute. A theory is only as true as the evidence bearing upon its validation; hence, it is never absolutely true. Rather, it approximates greater truth the greater the observations supporting it. Consequently, even if the thesis of underdetermination is accepted, its implications are: a validated theory is truer than an unvalidated one, and so continue validating as much as possible, because the more a theory is validated, the greater its approximation of the truth.

A second critique of science has been Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) views on the incommensurability of paradigms. This was the position that different scientific ‘paradigms’ often cannot be understood in terms of each other. Kuhn’s paradigms were composed of theories, and he was claiming that if one cannot conceptualize two theories using the same concepts (i.e. they are incommensurable), then the theories cannot be comparatively validated, which means that it is not possible to know which is the more validated theory and hence the truer one. This position has been criticized (earlier by Lakatos 1970; Shapere 1984; and more recently by Weinberg 2001: 196–197; Boghossian 2006: 120–125; Sokal 2008: 191–197). A basic point of the criticism is recognition that theories which often appear mutually incomprehensible often turn to not be so. Moreover, even if Kuhn’s position turned out to be correct, it is not an argument in favor of cessation of the validation of theory. A validated theory is always preferable to an unvalidated one. But he is warning that validation of two or more theories to learn which of the two is the preferred may be difficult.

Finally, a third critique has been what is termed the problem of the theory-ladenness of observation – formulated by Kuhn (1970), Quine (1960), and Hanson (1958). Roughly speaking, it is the view: Don’t trust your senses, because observations are imbued with theoretical bias. In its strongest version, the theory-ladenness of observation thesis suggests that theoretical bias in concepts overrides observation, which implies that observations do not validate theory. There has been very considerable debate over the theory-ladenness of observation position (Kitcher 1993: 222–233; Brown 2001). Part of the controversy has been over the obscurity of the notion of ‘theory-laden’. Just how does observation become ‘laden’ with theory? There is some consensus that the position ‘by no means undercuts the epistemic claims of science’ (Sokal 2008: 8). To understand why this might be true, consider that theories are laden (i.e. biased) in the sense that their concepts ask those using them to observe reality in terms of those concepts. For example, in 1703 Georg Stahl, chemistry professor in Halle, theorized that all burnable material had phlogiston in it that was liberated during burning. Such a theory obliged one to look for the phlogiston. Observation led to the discovery of no phlogiston and to the recognition that it was an explanatory fiction. Stahl’s theory was abandoned. It was no longer a phlogiston-laden world. Key here is the recognition that observation allows one to liberate oneself from the bias of concepts.

Three general points emerge from the preceding discussion. The first is that, when examined more closely, a number of the apparent criticisms of science are not simply attacks upon science. The second is that the post-positivist philosophers’ claims about science’s imperfections – the underdetermination of theory by evidence, the incommensurability of paradigms, or the theory-ladenness of observation – are not especially threatening of scientific practice. Third, this reiterates Russell’s judgment that scientific inquiry, mandated by realism, is a ‘better’ way of knowing ‘something’ than unscientific speculation. It is time to investigate the ontology of critical structural realism.

Ontology

If reality is ‘something’, then the big question is: what is the nature of ‘something’? Ontology explores answers to this question. In ancient philosophy, for example, Democritus and Lucretius believed that the universe was ultimately entirely composed of ‘uncuttables’ or, what are now termed atoms (Burnet 1920). Such ontology meant that the study of the universe should be a search for knowledge about atoms. The ontology of CSR goes back to the ancients and asks, with the hindsight of what is now known about atoms: if atoms are the basis of all being, what is the nature of atoms? To which question, the following one word answer is: structure! Atoms have their structures, and all things that atoms connect with equally have their structures – everything from molecules to the human organisms to (getting gigantic really fast) the cosmos have their structures. Otherwise put, there is nothing without something else to which it is related; and things connected to things are structures. Althusser said it all, ‘The real: it is structured’. So the objects of study in such an ontology are the realities of different sorts of structures. CRS studies social being – complex structures of persons in some relations with other persons – across space and over time.

Of course, there are anti-structuralists, thinkers unwilling to make structure an ontological fundamental of their approach. Let us scrutinize two of their arguments. These might be called ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ anti-structuralisms. Strong anti-structuralist positions query the existence of structures. An important recent strong anti-structural view is that of those (largely) French postmodernists styled post-structuralists (Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari) whose work was chiefly a reaction against the French structuralism of the 1940s and 1950s, which had sought to understand linguistic, psychological, and social structure largely in terms of de Sausaure’s model of the structure of language. According to Madan Sarup (1993), post-structuralism is devoted to revealing that surface structures pertaining to humans – be they those of meaning, language, or social institutions – hide an underlying instability, even chaos. For example, the post-structuralist critic Pierre Machery, speaking of literary texts, said: ‘the concealed order of the work is … less significant than its real determinate disorder (its disarray)’ (in Ward 2003: 98). Two criticisms of this view are telling.

The first is simply the overwhelming observation of structures in all realms of reality. Many believe three sorts of structures compose reality – the ‘gigantic’, those pertaining to the entire cosmos; the ‘minuscule’, those involving sub-atomic elementary particles; and in between these, the ‘complex’, everything larger than sub-atomic organizations and smaller than cosmological ones. But the post-structuralists are correct in believing that structures may fall into ‘disorder’. People are born, they live their lives, and they die; and when they do their bodies no longer function; they are in ‘disorder’. The same fate appears to befall all structures: they come into being, they exist for some time, and they pass out of being; but, when this latter event occurs, their components become part of some other structure. On death the parts of the human body are transformed into other living or non-living structures. Disorder, then, appears as but one moment in the structural dynamics of reality. Attention turns to a second problem with the post-structuralist position.

Second, and more important, it is by no means clear that post-structuralists really do reject structure. Derrida, for example, in his famous essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, said: ‘structure – or rather the structurality of structure – although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center’ (1978: 278). Derrida is not denying structure in this essay. Far from it, he explicitly asserts ‘structure … has always been at work’, but that it has been ‘neutralized’. Baudrillard also explicitly indicates belief in human structures. For example, in The Consumer Society (1998 [1970]) he argues that alienation under capitalism cannot be suppressed because ‘it is the very structure of market society’. Douglas Kellner, Baudrillard’s distinguished interpreter, notes that after Baudrillard took the post-structuralist turn in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993) and Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he came to believe that ‘modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation’ (2007). The key point here is that Baudrillard is concerned with how different societies are ‘organized’ and, of course, something that is organized has structure.

Consider next Deleuze and Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus (1972) has been a central post- structural text. When one first reads it there is a strong whiff of anti-structuralism. For example, they declare: ‘We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits’ (1983: 42). A ‘partial’ world whose ‘bricks’ are ‘in bits’ sounds like one where structure has been ‘shattered’ (figuratively, at least). But, then, read again. On the very first page of Anti-Oedipus it is said: ‘Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones’ (1983: 1, emphasis in the original). Deleuze and Guattari are talking here about humans, and ‘each’ of us has our ‘little machines’ (1983: 1). Then, on the following page they plug human machines into other machines, insisting: ‘Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, stars or rainbows in the sky, Alpine machines – all of them connect to those of his body’ (1983: 2). Now ‘machines’ are structures. Further, Deleuze and Guattari are pretty explicit. Machines are ‘real’. ‘Everything is a machine’. ‘All’ are connected to human bodies. Deleuze and Guattari are structuralists. In sum, a strong anti-structuralist position seems a stretch given the two sorts of problems just documented.

Weak anti-structuralisms do not deny the existence of structure, rather – in some way – they question its significance. Two important strands of weak anti-structuralisms are discussed, one emphasizing chance, the other a structure/process dualism. The first weak anti-structuralism begins by observing there are chance happenings of single events and then asserts that chance is opposed to structure. For example, people happen by chance to blink. However, a blink does not just happen. It is under the control of a particular structure, that of the autonomic nervous system. This chance argument can be extended to important human events, by affirming that most of what happens in human affairs is the result of good or bad luck. The Battle of Hastings, so critical in English history, illustrates this view. In 1066, Harold Godwinson, the Anglo-Saxon king of England – dressed to kill in a mail hauberk and seven-colored tartan, a terrific warrior who had just crushed the Norwegian king at Stamford Bridge – was having a fine battle at Hastings against the Normans. His shield wall was holding; a gratifying number of Norman cavalry were perishing. Then Harold looked up. A Norman arrow descended into his eye. Harold died. The shield wall broke. Too bad, bad luck; and the Anglo-Saxons lost the Battle of Hastings – forever changing British history. But luck had nothing to do with it. Two structures had been in operation at the Battle of Hastings. These were the organizations of the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman armies. A part of the Norman military structure was the archers, whose job it was to send arrows over to the enemy to kill them. Harold’s death was part of the normal operation of this Norman military structure.

It might be argued that chaos theory (Gleick 1988), which appears to deal with random events, supports a weak anti-structuralism. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Chaos theory involves mathematical descriptions of the behavior of certain types of dynamical systems –i.e. structures whose states evolve with time – that exhibit changes which are enormously sensitive to initial conditions. Such changes are said to be ‘butterfly effects’, big changes resulting from small initial conditions. Structures exhibiting such effects are said to be chaotic. As a result of this sensitivity, manifesting itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears random. Nevertheless, these systems are deterministic, because their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply ‘chaos’. Hence, the term chaos is a misnomer, for it is simply the behavior of a particular type of structure. The preceding suggests that chance is an explanatory fiction – a sort of phlogiston said to characterize events when the structures that bring them about are unspecified or unknown.

A second, weak anti-structuralist argument follows from a structure/process dualism. Some would have it there are structures out there but there are also processes. Adherents of such a position are often Heraclitians. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540–475 BC) was the pre-Socratic philosopher remembered for saying: ‘it is impossible to descend into the same river’ (in Burnet 1920). This was by way of insisting that the universe was a place of ceaseless change, i.e. flux, so you could never put your foot in the same river because each time you did so it had flowed on. So if the nature of being was flux you needed to study flux, and analyzing processes allowed you to do this because they were what happen to things over time. Such arguments imply a structure/process dualism – with process about what happens to different realities over time, and structures about the realities of parts and their connections timelessly considered.

An influential partisan of structure/process dualism can be found in Norbert Elias, whose figurational sociology, especially in The Civilizing Process (2000 [1939]), argued that the study of structure led only to hopelessly incomplete static social knowledge because social realities were in Heraclitian flux. To address this problem he advocated the study of process. However, in order to do this he promoted investigation of ‘figuration’, which involved networks of persons dependent upon each other. Of course, ‘networks’ whose parts (human beings) were dependent upon each other were structures, which meant Elias was suggesting that in order to analyze process investigators needed to study network structure – perhaps because structure and process are part of a common reality, as will be suggested following consideration of another structure/process proponent.

Raymond Firth in Elements of Social Organization redefined social anthropology as the study of ‘human social process comparatively’ (1963: 2). He believed there was a set of phenomena that could be classified as social structure and another set that could be called social process, and that it was import to ‘distinguish between’ them (1963: 35). Social structure was ‘the ordered relations of parts to a whole’ (1963: 30). Social process was ‘the arrangement of action in sequences in conformity with selected social ends’ (1963: 36). This was a dualism. Structure was one thing, ‘ordered relations of parts’; process another, ‘action in sequences’. But this is a false dualism. Processes are structures in action – that is, structures doing things over time. The process of ‘boiling water’ is what happens to the atomic structures of water under the condition of increasing heat. The process of ‘increasing impoverishment’ is what happens to class structures under conditions of increasing recession. In sum, neither the strong nor the weak anti-structuralisms refute the judgment that, ‘The real: it is structured’. This means that talking about social ‘somethings’ without talking about structure is talking about nothing, which is why consideration of structure is a condition of analysis of the human condition. It is time to consider a condition that is decisive for making moral judgment about the events in the human ‘something’. This will lead us to the critical in critical structural realism.

Critical science

Consider the following: A murder has been perpetrated. Nobody knows who did it. There are lots of possibilities. The detective’s job is to figure out exactly what is the case – who done it and why – only then can the criminal be brought to justice. A more general implication of this situation is that a requirement of making moral judgments is that one must know the facts of the matter. If you do not know what is happening, you cannot know if it is good or bad, because you do not know if it is or isn’t. This means that the practice of validation is a condition of moral judgment. Observation, and observation alone, allows moral referees to know as accurately as possible what is; and if you do not know what is, you cannot know if it is good or bad according to the canons of some morality.

How, then, does a discipline practice validation in the service of morality in the human ‘something’? One answer to this question involves integrating a notion of hermetic seal into Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory. Horkheimer’s suggestions of how to be critical, as argued in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1975 [1937]), began by distinguishing ‘traditional’ from ‘critical’ scientific theory. Traditional science was not bad. In fact, it was good in the sense that it practiced ‘the critical examination of data’ (Horkheimer 1975 [1937]: 205), by which he meant it validated theory. However, Horkheimer did believe there was a major fault in traditional science: its observations and generalizations follow the biases of social perceptions and values and not the actuality of being. Horkheimer, in a sense, had anticipated the thesis of theory-ladenness of observation by two decades. Let us conceptualize theory-laden observation in terms of bias. ‘Bias’ is understood as perceptions that such and such are the nature of ‘something’ and values that ‘some things’ are good and others bad. Bias occurs because: ‘Science and technology are only elements in an existing social totality’ (Horkheimer 1939). Totality, at its simplest, is all that is that is society. The consciousnesses of individuals, understood as their perceptions and values of ‘something’, are shaped by the forces of the ‘totality which they form’ (Adorno 2000 [1969–1970]: 145); which implies that scientific consciousnesses, because science is an element in society, are determined by society.

This is because scientists, like all humans, acquire the value presuppositions of their social position within the totality. For example, a male social thinker living in the social and historical context of the early 1900s US might well be sexist, because one presupposition he might have held was that ‘a wife was socially pretty much like her husband’. This meant, should this male scientist be investigating cross-cultural difference, that his generalizations about the topic need not include any specifics concerning women. For example, he might have proposed: ‘The health of those in a culture varies with that culture’s wealth’. This generalization, then, could be said to be laden with the value that women and men were pretty much the same health wise. This would mean that facts about whether or not women were different, had different incidences of disease, would be irrelevant to validating the generalization because the judgment as to what constituted a fact in it was laden by the value that the woman was a clone of her hubby.

As a consequence of science being value-laden, Horkheimer insisted that: ‘The chief aim of’ critical science ‘is to prevent mankind from losing itself in those ideas and activities which the existing organization of society instills into its members’ (Horkheimer 1939, emphasis in original). Horkheimer and Adorno felt especially strongly about this because they believed that the then current version of society featured an ‘immense concentration of economical and administrative power [which] leaves the individual no more room to maneuver’ and that leads ‘society toward totalitarian forms of domination’ (Adorno 1998: 298). What Horkheimer and Adorno are saying is that the immense concentrations of power in current capitalist and state institutions create a category of actors who can be termed the ‘powerful’, those with mammoth amounts of political and economic force giving them a capacity to do many things to many people. The powerful can control the bias of the ideas being produced and communicated for everybody in society. As a result, not only does scientific generalization become value-laden but so does the ordinary consciousness of normal people. Such consciousnesses are said to be hermetically sealed into particular spaces of perception and value: Being critical means using validation to crack any hermetic seal, but especially those imposed by the powerful capitalist and governmental elites. Critical science in this optic is a morality, premised on the belief that it is good to free humans from the perceptions and values desired by the powerful as these perceptions lead to totalitarian social ‘somethings’.

Three ways can be imagined by which critical science can relax hermetic seal. A first way of doing this is to examine the existing concepts bearing upon the realities of the social fields to see if concepts are lacking which, if present, would be unfavorable to the desires of the powerful and favorable to others. For example, the concept of ‘unemployment’ as currently officially measured by the US government under-reports the number of Americans not working (Bradbury 2006). The government way of measuring unemployment is to tally the number of people without jobs who are currently looking for them. This means that not included in the unemployed are discouraged workers, people who have given up looking for work, and the underemployed, those working but at levels below their skills. Thus, in early 2011 the US government reported that 9.2 percent of the American labor force was out of work. However, John Williams has devised a concept of unemployment considered to be more accurate than the official measure because it includes those non-workers excluded from the government’s concept of unemployment. According to this concept of unemployment, fully 20 percent of the US labor force was not working in October 2011 (Williams 2011). Powerful capitalists want to be able to reassure people that capitalism is a great economic system working in their interests. Consciousness that one in five working Americans cannot find work does not provide such reassurance. Lacking, then, is an official concept of employment that accurately presents US unemployment, perhaps because such a concept challenges the desires of the powerful capitalists.

Conversely, a second way of challenging the powerful’s hermetic seal is to examine existing concepts bearing upon the realities of social totalities to see if existing concepts are favorable to the desires of the powerful and unfavorable to others. Clearly, the official way of conceiving unemployment is just such a concept because it reports that more people are working than is actually the case, providing a false consciousness concerning the beneficence of capitalism.

A third way to challenge the hermetic seal is to utilize validation to examine powerful claims as to who benefits from different developments. This can be done by validating generalizations where the powerful claim that certain developments benefit people in general. If it can be observed that the developments actually benefit the powerful at the expense of the majority of people, then generalizations are said to be value-laden with bias in favor of the powerful. David Harvey, for example, has gathered evidence validating whether ‘neo-liberalism’ involves economic and social developments that benefit society in general. He has provided evidence to the contrary, that the chief beneficiaries of neo-liberalism have been the upper classes (Harvey 2005).

The moral goal of critical science is to break the hermetic seal, in ways that emancipate persons from the biases of the powerful in their societies. Unfortunately, as earlier documented, postmodernists are lax in their validation, disdainful of truth, and do not know what is the case – and you cannot evaluate the moral status of ‘something’ if you don’t know what it is. It is time to draw the reasoning of this section together and conclude by expounding certain virtues of critical structural realism.

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‘Nothing grounds’ the practices of Rorty’s postmodernists. Three fundamentals ground critical structural realism, and it is these I believe that give the standpoint its virtues. To grasp these, let us begin with the ontology. Structures are what exist in being. Structures – some minute, others vast – come into existence, persist for a time, fail, but in their failing transform into some other sort of structure. Some post-structural postmodernists, such as Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze and Guattari, acknowledge the importance of structure and, in different ways, have utilized it. Chaos turns out to have a structure. Processes are structures in action. Structures, then, are the Kantian ‘something’, and so it is sensible to get out there to investigate them. Postmodernists who reject the study of structure in effect elect to spend their lives investigating the human ‘nothing’.

Consider next epistemology: Science, working with the tools of realism, has been the better way of acquiring knowledge about realities. Criticisms of science, from the vantage of postmodernism and other positions, were entertained. Two findings emerged from these considerations. First, some elements of the criticisms were significant and suggested that science might be more modest in its claims to knowledge. Second, however, science’s practice of seeking – through validation based upon observation – the approximate truth of theories remains the unsurpassed means of acquiring knowledge of reality. If one is serious about knowing about the human ‘something’, to consciously choose an epistemology that is indifferent to the search of approximate truths is epistemic recklessness.

Finally, you practice a critical science because of a morality in which you take sides, and that side is of people, against the powerful seeking to please themselves. Perhaps this mortality is the exact opposite of that of Nietzsche’s, with its glorification of the Űbermensch. Actually existing Supermen, as opposed to the ones that Nietzsche conjured, are comic book characters, who turn out to be hotshot CEOs or nasty politicians hell bent upon gratifying their desires. Critical science uses the tools of validation to determine the degree that perceptions and values, including those of scientific theory, hermetically seal people’s consciousness into ideas and feelings that gratify the powerful’s desires, so they may liberate themselves from that consciousness. Why have such a morality? Because it is better than helping comic book heroes – bloated with economic and political force – to use other people as instruments of their pleasure.

So what are the virtues of critical structural realism? Ontologically, it helps to keep the explanatory eye firmly fixed on the human structural ‘something’; epistemologically, it offers more rigorous ways of knowing that ‘something’; and critically, it helps to make it a little bit more difficult for the powerful to arrange ‘something’ into their pleasure palace. At this juncture the anthropological reader may ask: what has this to do with anthropology? The following section answers this query, suggesting that a neo-Boasianism can be an anthropological approach which enjoys the virtues of critical structural realism.

Boasian realism

Boas was part of the ferment concerning understanding the nature of science that occurred around the turn of the 20th century. In the spring of 1883, preparing for his ethnographic expedition to Baffin Island, Boas worked with Rudolf Virchow in Berlin. Virchow (1821–1902), trained as a physician and pathologist, was a polymath who contributed to a number of disciplines including prehistory and ethnology. Boas, writing just after Virchow’s death, recalled the basis of Virchow’s approach to science, stating: ‘His position rests on the general scientific principle that it is dangerous to classify data that are imperfectly known under the point of view of general theories, and that the sound progress of science requires us to be clear at every moment what elements in the system of science are hypothetical and what are the limits of knowledge which is defined by exact observation’ (1902: 442). Virchow’s emphasis upon ‘exact observation’ so that generalization would not be ‘imperfectly known’ would characterize Boas’s own thought.

Two decades later at the very turn of the 20 century, Boas and his graduate students at the time read, absorbed, and approved the texts of a number of philosophers challenging science’s fundamentals. Lowie identified the texts and actors involved in this confrontation as including the

second, enlarged edition of Karl Pearson’s The Grammer of Science and the second, enlarged edition of Ernst Mach’s Die Analyse de Empfindungen appeared in 1900; H. Poincaré’s La science et l’hypothese in 1903; Wilhelm Ostwald’s Varlesungen über Naturphilosophie in 1902. Crystallizing his earlier thoughts, Wm. James published Pragmatism in 1907, A Pluralistic Universe in 1909. John Dewey’s instrumentalism was correctly felt to represent a related point of view. As Pearson remarked at the time, ‘many minds are being stirred to reconsider the fundamental concepts of science’. (Lowie 1956: 1012)

Pearson, Mach and Poincaré, echoing the slightly older Virchow, were disputing Comtean positivism – here understood as a particular type of realism. Boas was familiar with Mach because both were German and had studied similar areas of physics. Mach worked in optical physics and Boas’s ‘doctoral work’ was ‘grounded in … Machian psychophysics’ (Darnell 2001: 41). Mach’s was an austere revision of science, for as Mach once put it: ‘The goal which it [physical science] has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts’ (in Kockelman 1968). Boas had long been in acceptance of Mach’s position, stating in the late 1880s: ‘All agree that the establishment of facts is the foundation and starting point of science’ (1974 [1887]: 641). Virchow and Mach might be said to have helped create a post-Comtean realism, one that emphasized validation over theorizing as the key to knowing ‘something’. Boas, then, was a realist, one most interested in settling arguments with facts. Let us now turn to Boas as a critical scientist.

Boasian critical science

Boas is sometimes classified as ‘liberal’ (Cole 1999: 278), at other times as a ‘progressive’ (Stern 1943) but, according to his grandson, certainly ‘not a radical’ (Boas 2004: 233). I’m not so certain about the grandson’s judgment. During the time of his first ethnography on Baffin Island, Boas wrote his fiancé: ‘I believe one can be really happy only as a member of humanity as a whole, if one works with all one’s energy together with the masses toward high goals’ (in Lesser 1981: 12). In another letter he declared: ‘What I want to live and die for, is equal rights for all, equal possibilities to learn and work for poor and rich alike!’ (in Cole 1983: 37). Thus at the beginning of his intellectual career Boas takes sides. He sees himself as a member of ‘humanity as a whole’. He desires to ‘work with the masses’ to ‘live and die’ for equality ‘for all’. This may not be a Marxist radicalism. It is a left cosmopolitanism, and the case can be made that Boas’s science was critical in the sense discussed in the previous section.

This was because Boas used facts as a means releasing people’s consciousnesses from their hermetic seal in favor of the powerful’s biases. Two areas stand out where this was the case –cultural evolutionary theory and race. Cultural evolutionary theory, as formulated by Lewis Henry Morgan, EB Tyler, and others in the 19th century, was congenial to the powerful’s desires because it legitimated imperial exploitation; by providing scientific ‘proof’ that there were inferior cultures, which meant that imperial structures were needed to provide wholesome tutelage to savage or barbarous inferiors. A series of studies, beginning with Boas’s ‘Limitations of the Comparative Method’ (1896), showed that the evidence was inconsistent with existing theories of cultural evolution (see Harris 1968), thereby undermining the scientific rationale for imperialism.

Racism was another theory at the turn of the 20th century which legitimated exploitation by the powerful either within a capitalist country and/or that country’s empire. After all, if people were members of inferior races, they were biological bottom-feeders, and bottom-feeders because of their very biological nature scavenged the floor of capitalist and imperial seas. There was no exploitation here: just bad inferiors finding their own level. Again the Boasians, especially Boas’s brilliant studies of head form among New York immigrants, showed the evidence to be inconsistent with racial generalizations, in effect severing the head of racist theory from the body of validated knowledge. After all, Boas believed the facts of the matter were that ‘the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world’ (1911, in Mead and Bunzel 1960: 407). Boas, then, was using science in the critical manner defined in the first section of this paper. Let us investigate Boas the structuralist. Here there will be problems. But in the midst of these will be a Boasian insight that will lead to a novel structuralism, offering an answer to the most basic of human questions: how do people make connections between antecedents and consequents in space and time?

Neo-Boasian structuralism ³

Neither Boas nor the other Boasians were particularly engrossed in structure. Though they described the social organization of peoples, they never, on the basis of this information, developed ontological inquiry into the nature of human organization. However, there is one aspect of Boas’s thought that, if expanded upon, leads to a new structuralism. This was his insistence, as indicated in the above quotation, that biological and cultural phenomena are a ‘whole’. Boas strongly believed this to be the case. He devised a four-field approach to anthropology where cultural anthropologists, linguists, and archaeologists analyzed the cultural, while biological anthropologists investigated the biological. But, having looked into the ‘whole’, Boas spent much of his intellectual life trying to show that for one area of biology, race, there was no connection with culture. Further, the other Boasians for the most part followed Lowie in believing ‘Omnis cultura ex cultura’, by which he meant that ‘culture … can be explained only in terms of itself’ (1966 [1917]: 66). What follows below is reasoning to explain that the cultural and the biological are, indeed, a whole, and that the nature of this is such that it makes possible human social structure. Let us begin by answering the question: what makes possible human social forms?

Making relationship: A condition of structure

Structure, any structure, consists of parts in relationships to each other that persist through time and space. Ultimately in human structures the parts are individual actors. Their relationships are what they do with other actors. Actors doing things with other actors occur over time and in space, and can be said to be the operations of structure. First, one actor does something, followed by another actor doing something else because of what the first actor did. The doing of things between actors is their relationships. Relationship is the linking of antecedents, prior doings, with consequents, subsequent doings. What actors do is their actions. The antecedent actions of actors are related to consequent actions of actors in practices. Sets of actors in relationship producing practices are in groups. Practices of many sets of actors are observed related with the actions of many other sets of actors in organizations of groups that can today exhibit extraordinary complexity and global spatial reach. Ultimately, however, a condition for all human structures to operate is the existence of ‘something’ that creates relationships; that is, there must be some reality that connects all antecedent actions to all consequent actions. Let us call this reality, which is a material one, the connector and provide reasons in the next section for the belief that a cultural neurohermentic system is this connector making possible human social forms.

The connector

Connectors, in the sense developed above, are themselves systems. They are structures with three related parts. The parts are related in the sense that they are attached to each other by information that flows between them. The first part takes an antecedent ‘something’ from the external world outside an actor’s body and attaches it within that actor’s body. The second part of the connector systems operates within the actor’s body to generate some response to the antecedent event. The third part takes this response and sends information of it to parts of the body that turn it into subsequent action consequent upon the antecedent ‘something’, in effect attaching the subsequent action back out in the external world. Elsewhere I have termed the three parts of the connector ‘antecedent attachment devices’ (AADs), ‘connector devices’ (CDs) and ‘subsequent attachment devices’ (SADs) (Reyna 2006). It is possible to specify the anatomy of this connector. The AAD is the different afferent neural pathways that lead from receptor organs – eyes, ears, nose, etc. – through the thalamus into the cortex bearing electrochemical information about an antecedent ‘something’. These neural networks bring this information to the CD. The CD is the neurological structures of the brain that operate upon this information of antecedent actualities, generating responses concerning what it is desirable to do about them. Neural information representing desirable responses is transmitted to the SAD. The SAD consists of the efferent neural pathways which leave from the CD for the pre-motor and motor cortices, thence on to the basal ganglia and cerebellum and, finally, down the spinal cord to the different organs of the body, like the muscles that attach to, and effect, external reality. These pathways bring information about desires from the CD concerning what to do subsequently about what happened antecedently. The next step is to inquire more fully into the connector device, suggesting it is something of a cultural neurohermenetic system that operates as an interpretive hierarchy.

The connector device: A cultural neurohermeneutic system

The connector device is different parts of the brain operating upon electro-chemical information about antecedent actualities in order to perform subsequent actions. Such brain operations are termed ‘interpretation’. It is at this point that culture becomes important. Culture is understood to be learned, shared categories of what is and what to do about what is. Culture exists, in discursive and neuronal forms (Reyna 2002). ‘Discursive culture’ is external to actors, existing as spoken or written messages based upon cultural notions of what is and what to do about it. ‘Neuronal culture’ is within individuals, and refers to neural memory networks that store the contents of different cultural categories. It is important to recognize that it is the hippocampus (Fuster 1995) that is involved in taking discursive culture and laying it down within the brain’s neural memory networks (Roediger et al. 2007).

Cultural categorizations of what is are called ‘perceptual’, because they classify reality, and abstractions about reality, into different signs. Instructions for dealing with different perceptual cultural categories are said to be ‘procedural’ (Reyna 2002). Neuronal cultural systems, thus, have perceptual and procedural aspects. For example, among the Barma, of Chad there are the cultural signs kuin and ne. Perceptually mothers and mothers’ sisters are classified as kuin. Procedurally kuin are shown hormo (respect). Perceptually wives are classified as ne. Procedurally one may perform niknik (intercourse) with ne. So, at a point in time A, a mother arrives. She is interpreted as a kuin, and at a subsequent time B she is given hormo. Similarly, at a point in time A, a wife arrives. She is interpreted as a ne, and subsequently at time B niknik occurs. A has been connected with B because cultural categorizations are used during brain operations to make interpretations based upon the neuronal culture, giving humans the capacity to link antecedent with subsequent being; literally stringing being together. So the connector device, because brain operations using culture do the interpretation of antecedent being prior to stringing it to subsequent being, is a cultural neurohermeneutic system (hereafter CNHS).

The following section suggests that the CNHS may be hypothesized to work as an interpretive hierarchy, and speculates upon the brain structures responsible for this hierarchy. This hierarchy involves both the increasing involvement of different parts of the CNHS in interpretations as well as the increasing complexity of those interpretations. Specifically, this interpretive hierarchy appears to have four levels – of reflex, sensational-world, life-world and desire.