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Scaling up; scaling down: What’s missing?

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Abstract

What are we trying to explain when we explain behavior? How is behavior conceptualized as an object of study and how else might it be conceptualized? Longino (Studying human behavior, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2013) urges pluralism with respect to causes and explanations of behavior. This paper extends Longino’s analysis to the object of those explanations and urges pluralism with respect to behavior itself. The paper proposes that there are three ways in which behavior can be conceptualized, each of which opens to different kinds of research questions.

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Notes

  1. I am grateful to Christophe Malaterre and Eric Muzynski for the stimulus to write this paper and to two anonymous reviewers for Synthèse whose comments made this a much better paper than it would otherwise have been.

  2. Evolutionary biology, for example, has seen a resurgence of interest in group selection subsequent to the publication of Sober and Wilson (1998). Ecology has been another arena in biology for debate about units and levels of analysis. See Justus (2014) and Odenbaugh (2007). I will not be discussing these debates here, but focusing on research into proximate factors affecting behavior, especially human behavior.

  3. For a useful review of discussions of methodological individualism in philosophy of social science, see Heath (2015). For a classic defense, see Elster (1982).

  4. For example, Gilbert (1989, 1996) and Epstein (2015).

  5. Longino (2013). The remarks in Sect. 2 will draw heavily on Chapter Nine.

  6. Studying indeed suggests this, but in a muted way.

  7. Population genetics is generally employed in the context of evolutionary biology, to identify changes in gene frequencies in a population. Quantitative behavior genetics, at least as applied to human behavior, is interested in the heritability of a trait in a population.

  8. See Longino (2013, pp. 157–161) for citations to articles using these operationalizations.

  9. Some researchers and reviews distinguish delinquency and aggression, but many do not.

  10. See Klonsky et al. (2002) and Miles and Carey (1997) for disconfirmations of this assumption. They show that different informant categories or different observation settings generate different values for the same individuals, thus casting doubt on the robustness of any data acquired using these methods.

  11. Whalen et al. (1990) proposed the following as dimensions of variation worth study: degree of arousability, frequency of sexual interaction, number of partners, features of partner other than sex/gender identity. Their proposal has not, so far as I can tell, been taken up by fellow researchers.

  12. This analysis draws on ideas first advanced in Longino (2002).

  13. See Longino (2015) for further discussion.

  14. While quantitative behavior genetics measures variance of a trait in a population, the trait is understood as a property of the individual members of the population, and one of the aims of the research is to identify traits for study with other, e.g. molecular, genetic methods that may have a bearing on causal questions. Some researchers have even gone so far as to claim that quantitative behavior genetics can inform about individuals (Burgess and Molenaar 1993).

  15. For examples of aggregative thinking about population level problems, see Brunner et al. (1993) and Moffitt and Mednick (1988).

  16. For examples of non-aggregative reasoning see Fagan et al. (2003) and Anderies et al. (2004).

  17. An exception would be efforts to attribute group differences in average scores on cognitive tests to factors generative of individual difference using twin and adoption studies. These efforts (1) simply assume that a factor making a difference among individuals in one context would have the same effect in another (2) assume that group differences are simply aggregations of individual differences and (3) have been thoroughly critiqued for failing to adequately distinguish one kind of individual level factor from another in the studies performed. See Nisbett et al. (2012) for a recent review.

  18. Eley et al. (1999).

  19. List and Spiekermann (2013).

  20. List and Spiekermann (2013, p. 632).

  21. Ibid, p. 633.

  22. This is shorthand for a more elaborate definition, e.g. this one from De Jaeghere et al. (2010) “Accordingly, we define social interaction as a co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where: (i) the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, constituting an autonomous self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics and (ii) the autonomy of the agents involved is not destroyed (although its scope can be augmented or reduced).” I imagine interactions among non human entities could be included in a suitably modified version of this definition.

  23. Thanks to Esther Rosario for reminding me of this example. For additional detail see Lloyd (2005).

  24. While still focused on types of individuals, Granic and Lamey (2002) and Granic and Patterson (2006) do begin to take interactions (in their case, mother–son) as an object of investigation.

  25. And, as one reviewer commented, similar issues regarding scaling up and down are likely to arise once we turn the analytic lens on interaction per se.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Helen E. Longino

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Longino, H.E. Scaling up; scaling down: What’s missing?. Synthese 198, 2849–2863 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02249-y

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