Catherine Will & Tiago Moreira, eds, Medical Proofs, Social Experiments. Clinical Trials in Shifting Contexts, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.

More than half a century ago now, physicians began to struggle with how to assess the efficacy of treatments. As the late Harry Marks documented at length, around the 1950s the two alternatives considered for making these assessments were the case-based judgment of individual experts and the results of randomized clinical trials (RCTs). However, after only a few decades, the RCT reached the apex of the hierarchy of clinical evidence, where it remains despite the objections of a number of dissenting doctors, philosophers and sociologists. The compilation edited by Catherine Will and Tiago Moreira brings us a selection of the most recent sociological literature on medical experiments. It is interesting to note that, as the editors themselves present it, this book constitutes a vindication of case-based reasoning against the purported generality of RCTs. In these latter, we assume that we are dealing with a representative sample of patients and a standardized treatment protocol, allowing us to generalize our conclusions beyond the trial. The case studies compiled in this book question the possibility of such generalization: as the editors conclude, information about how clinical trials are organized and carried out goes beyond reporting of methods and is crucial for critical interpretation of evidence. This information should be compiled precisely through case studies, bridging the gap between the agents defined in the research protocol and the communities and contexts where these protocols are implemented.

Unlike other edited collections of case studies, this one aims at constructing a systematic argument. In this respect, Will and Moreira have done a wonderful editorial job, making explicit the threads between the different chapters in their introduction and conclusion and in short prefaces to each of the three parts into which they divide their compilation. In part I, “The Practices of Research,” three case studies, by Stefan Timmermans, Ben Heaven and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, analyze how researchers struggle with trial protocols, either adapting them to their own goals, resisting them if they conflict with these latter or supplementing the protocols with their own ad hoc methods in order to assure that trials are completed. The editors present their own papers in part II, “Framing Collective Interpretation”. Both deal with the appraisal of trial results by third parties: the medical profession through their specialized journals and the State (the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence). In part III, “Testing the Limits for Policy,” three more papers discuss the use of trials for policy-making purposes. Again, the analyses focus on the role of contexts in policy-oriented trials: the adverse consequences of bracketing contextual information (briefly discussed by Trudy Dehue regarding depression) or the virtues of making the most of it in the trial (Ann Kelly and Alex Faulkner).

This quick summary is obviously guilty of saying very little about the actual the content of the papers. If we list them according to the interventions examined, we find a trial on the use of antidepressants (bupropion) against methamphetamine dependency (Timmermans), a comparison of two lifestyle interventions with medication against a common, chronic condition (Heaven), the controversy on the rosuvastatin trials (Will), the NICE cost-utility analysis of dementia drugs (Moreira), two hybrid trials of an arthritis screening program and of mesh screens against malaria (Kelly), and a recent British prostate cancer detection program (Faulkner).

The general point the editors are trying to make is that the conduct of clinical trials and the interpretation of their results depend not only on their research protocol, but on the intentions of the many agents who, one way or another, are involved in the process. Generalizing the results of a trial beyond their “context of discovery” is something that we can only decide on case by case basis. Indeed, from what they hint in the conclusion (e.g., p. 158), the editors would rather advocate redesigning regulatory trials so that their different stakeholders could have their say.

Emphasizing the ultimate context dependence of RCTs is a point worth making against those philosophers (or perhaps statisticians) who allow no epistemic role for such contextual dependencies of RCTs. But do the contextual dependencies discussed in this volume actually interfere with our ability to identify treatments that are efficacious for the general population? Do we have less reliable trials as a result of these out-of-the protocol interventions, and should the medical community consider alternatives to the RCT ?

Unfortunately, none of the papers in this collection addresses this crucial problem. The one that comes closest is Helgesson’s analysis the practices of out-of-protocol data cleaning in large Swedish RCTs. Helgesson tracks the ways in which data are informally recorded and corrected without leaving a trace in the trial’s logbook, from post-it notes to guesses about the misspelling of an entry. In his view, the trial participants who make such corrections do them in good faith in order to increase the credibility of their results. However, Helgesson explicitly refuses to discuss what sort of errors may be thus introduced in the data, as if “any idiosyncratic shaping of data should be understood as producing biased data and biased results” (p. 52) and we therefore cannot draw any conclusions about the impact of such errors on the interpretation of the study. But psychologists have documented at length how the credibility these practitioners seek is directly connected with confirmation biases, despite Helgesson’s contention: we all tend to accept more easily information that confirms our prior beliefs than disconfirming data. Confirmation biases have been documented in scientific laboratories, for instance, by Kevin Dunbar and his team at Toronto, who have shown as well that experimenters rely on bias-correction procedures from which the reliability of the data stems.

Are these informal practices of data recording and correction threatening the goals of trials as safety and efficacy tests? We know that RCTs do not provide full information about the effects of a drug, as the statistics on adverse effects reported to the FDA show. But, at the same time, regulatory clinical trials have so far been reasonably good at screening off the pharmaceutical markets from toxic and ineffective compounds. If trials were conducted to learn as much as we could about new treatments, perhaps the sort of contextual information provided in these case studies would help. In her chapter, Ann Kelly shows, for instance, how the self-selection of participants in a trial may turn out to be a good thing if the information gathered about this particular group of patients shows how to best implement a medical intervention. However, most RCTs are conducted just to prove certain effects to a skeptical audience (the regulatory agencies). Given RCTs track record of efficacy for regulatory purposes, how would an ethnography of the trial, or any reform of the type we saw Will and Moreira advocate, help the regulator in making his decision? Will it improve our current standards of safety and efficacy? Would it just make the trials more credible to the public?

At any rate, if case studies are to play a role in this re-shaped regulatory process, we ought to require from them the same warrants of impartiality we require from RCTs. A number of well-documented biases interfere in the conduct of trials and we try, at least, to prevent them with devices such as blinding and randomization. If a case study on the conduct of a trial should be taken into account by the regulator, by way of background information, how does this latter know that the report is not biased? Sociologists and anthropologists are presumably as vulnerable to biases as any other researcher involved in a trial, and the case-study should incorporate methodological caveats preventing partiality. Will and Moreira do not mention any such safeguards in their conclusions, but if their proposal ever succeeds, I am sure this is a problem they will have to address.

{December 2011}
{Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 33.5 (2012)}

Ángel Díaz de Rada, Cultura, antropología y otras tonterías, Trotta, Madrid

Durante años la divulgación científica más exitosa fue cosa de científicos naturales (principalmente físicos, a los que gradualmente se sumaron biólogos). Sólo en la última década los científicos sociales comenzaron a competir en popularidad como divulgadores gracias, sobre todo, a economistas y psicólogos (pensemos en Freakonomics o Stumbling on Happiness). Cabe sospechar que buena parte de su éxito se debe a cómo confirman o contradicen con sus datos algunas de nuestras intuiciones (o prejuicios) más arraigadas: por ejemplo, la de que somos capaces de anticipar nuestra felicidad futura (nos equivocamos sistemáticamente, según Gilbert). Sea explotando bases de datos con técnicas estadísticas o mediante experimentos (en el laboratorio o fuera de él), la evidencia que los científicos sociales están reuniendo sobre los fenómenos más diversos es digna de interés. Menos interesantes resultan las teorías de las que se sirven para explicarlos: la evidencia disponible ilustra más bien regularidades de carácter principalmente local, pero las ciencias sociales siguen sin leyes de aplicación general comparables a las de la física o la biología.

Ángel Díaz de Rada inaugura, creo, el género de la divulgación antropológica en nuestro país rebelándose contra estas convenciones literarias: Cultura, antropología y otras tonterías no pretende excitar nuestra curiosidad con la evidencia acumulada en trabajos de campo, sino aclarar la confusión reinante sobre el concepto de cultura. El libro se articula sobre una revisión de las principales teorías antropológicas sobre la cultura, a las que el autor opone su propia concepción, ilustrada de un modo decididamente coloquial. Díaz de Rada habla en primera persona y tutea al lector, recurriendo a ejemplos extraídos de la vida cotidiana con propósitos puramente didácticos. Díaz de Rada pretende convencerle de que su concepto de cultura es intelectualmente plausible y no se presta a usos políticos indeseables. Nuestro autor es un decidido adversario de las concepciones espiritualistas y esencialistas de la cultura, tanto en sus versiones académicas (entre antropólogos) como mundanas (entre nacionalistas, por ejemplo). El libro es abiertamente polémico: Díaz de Rada expone su propio concepto comparándolo críticamente con los de antropólogos clásicos y contemporáneos y aborda sus implicaciones prácticas (multiculturalismo o relativismo) sin temor a la controversia.

En su acepción más básica, la cultura sería, para Díaz de Rada, “el conjunto de reglas con cuyo uso las personas dan forma a su acción social”. Estas reglas no son primariamente enunciados verbales abstractos (“Hay que hacer...”), sino que se manifiestan corporalmente en la regularidad de nuestras acciones. Al describir tales reglas de un modo abstracto se pone en evidencia, en cambio, su carácter indeterminado: deben ser interpretadas contextualmente y, por tanto, no se prestan a un análisis causal de la acción. De ese juego de interpretaciones, que es parte de la propia interacción cultural, emerge la antropología como análisis sistemático de la conexión entre reglas. El principio que preside este análisis es el holismo: no es posible separar categorialmente unas reglas de otras, ya que el juego de interpretaciones puede conectar, potencialmente, cualquiera de ellas.

Para Díaz de Rada, las reglas son convenciones que van siendo reformuladas a medida que los sujetos les dan uso. De ahí su nominalismo sobre la cultura: el antropólogo sólo puede referirse a interpretaciones puntuales de cada una de sus reglas, señalando su aquí y ahora. Reificarlas, pretendiendo que una interpretación particular constituye la cultura de un grupo, es, ante todo, un error metodológico. Se trata, de hecho, del primero de los muchos errores que el autor denuncia en la parte final del libro: no puede haber gente sin cultura; no hace falta la escuela para “tener” cultura; la diversidad cultural no se reduce a diversidad lingüística; la cultura es una propiedad de cualquier forma de acción social (y no de una clase particular de ellas); la cultura no es tampoco propiedad distintiva de un individuo ni de un grupo de ellos.

Los capítulos finales abordan sin ambigüedad alguna los aspectos más declaradamente políticos del concepto: el multiculturalismo o el relativismo ya citados, por ejemplo. Como el lector podrá ya imaginarse, Díaz de Rada es abiertamente crítico con los usos reificadores (por ejemplo, en “Ministerio de Cultura”) y responsabiliza de ellos principalmente a nuestros prejuicios, sean etnocéntricos o puramente narcisistas. Al fin y al cabo, buena parte de lo que se denuncia en este libro es que nos servimos del concepto de cultura de un modo parcial e interesado, normalmente el que nos resulta de mayor conveniencia. Y de ahí la originalidad de este libro como empresa divulgativa: si triunfase entre el público y adoptase su propuesta, podríamos empezar a hablar de la cultura en un sentido menos confuso y algo más neutral.

Aun simpatizando con todas las consecuencias prácticas que Díaz de Rada extrae de su concepto, este lector es más bien escéptico respecto a su propósito de persuadirnos de que es mejor no renunciar al concepto de cultura. No es, desde luego, porque su propia versión no resulte intelectualmente atractiva: a mí al menos me lo parece, digamos que por afinidad filosófica. Pero uno esperaría algo más de una ciencia social: los economistas, por ejemplo, ven mercados por todas partes, pero si aceptamos este concepto no es por lo precisa que resulte su definición, sino por el tipo de análisis que posibilita. Un viejo debate entre científicos sociales enfrenta a quienes defienden un uso instrumentalista de sus modelos y teorías en contra de quienes defienden que el realismo es necesario. Los primeros dirían que no importa tanto qué sea la cultura, sino qué podemos sacar de nuestro trabajo de campo con uno u otro concepto. Para los realistas, en cambio, es necesario que nuestros conceptos se refieran adecuadamente a las cosas como condición indispensable para su análisis. Pese a su nominalismo, Díaz de Rada parece alinearse con estos segundos pero, leyendo su libro, se diría que los antropólogos pueden realizar su trabajo incluso sin ponerse de acuerdo sobre la definición de cultura. Da la impresión de que uno no hará mejor o peor antropología según cuál sea su concepto de cultura. Posiblemente, Ángel Díaz de Rada no lo crea así, pero su libro no se detiene en argumentarlo.

Soy igualmente escéptico respecto a su propuesta de reformar nuestros usos cotidianos del concepto, por distintas razones. Por un lado, creo que se necesitaría una fuerza policial desproporcionada para lograrlo: los teólogos llevan siglos dictándoles a los católicos cómo debe rezarse el credo, pero se necesita toda una Iglesia para lograrlo. Cuando la disciplina es simplemente educativa, ni los físicos aciertan a reformar nuestro entendimiento: aunque un estudiante domine la teoría de la relatividad, los psicólogos han puestos de manifiesto cómo, en su vida diaria, ese mismo estudiante razonará sobre física igual que un griego de hace dos mil años. ¿Bastaría con formarnos adecuadamente en antropología para escapar a la confusión cultural?

No obstante, ya que inevitablemente estamos sumidos en ella, el lector ilustrado hará bien en leer este ensayo de Díaz de Rada para, si no escapar a la confusión, sí al menos no abandonarse completamente a ella. Como su autor bien nos advierte, las consecuencias cuando uno se deja llevar por algunos conceptos de cultura suelen ser indeseables.

{Diciembre de 2010}
{Revista Internacional de Sociología, Vol 70, No 2 (2012)}

Paco Calvo & Toni Gomila, Handbook of Cognitive Science. An Embodied Approach, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2008

“Is cognitive activity more similar to a game of chess than to a game of pool?” This is the opening question of this volume and every social scientist concerned with the explanation of our decisions should carefully consider the answer. At least, they should if they use standard intentional explanations, where decisions result from a particular combination of beliefs and desires that purportedly captures our folk understanding of action. If we are not uncomfortable with such foundation is mostly thanks to the progress of cognitive science that shows how our beliefs and desires can be processed, beyond folk psychology, as “a computational manipulation of representational inner states”. If you are already wondering if there is anything else to a decision, you probably consider cognitive ability akin to a game of chess. The authors in this volume would rather see it as a game of pool, that is, a non-formal game in which you need to take into account real-time physical interactions. In the case of decisions, our sensorimotor interaction with a given environment plus our social interaction with other agents. All this conceived as a continuous process that should be modeled (and explained) as such: i.e., describing the range of changes that the agent-cum-environment system experiences over real time. In principle, there is no need to invoke standard mental representations or a global plan of action.

This seems to be the explanatory approach emerging in the interdisciplinary field of embodied cognitive science, at least according to the editors of this Handbook (p.13). Calvo and Gomila are well aware that not every author in their volume would accept such an approach to explanation. The aim of this compilation is precisely to bring the different agendas in this new field to converge on a joint research program (p.15). Among these agendas, the editors cite: ecological psychology, behavior-based AI, embodied cognition, distributed cognition, perceptual symbol systems, some forms of connectionism, interactivism and dynamical systems theory. Their common thread, according to Calvo and Gomila, is to conceive of cognition and behavior “in terms of the dynamical interaction (coupling) of an embodied system that is embedded in the surrounding environment” (p. 7). The reader is properly warned that many of these terms are still awaiting a more precise definition ―including here “embodied” (p.12)―, but Calvo and Gomila believe that the success obtained by this approach in certain particular domains justifies a generalization that would first redefine the research agenda of cognitive science. And then eventually expand into every other field in the social sciences where cognition plays an explanatory role.

The structure of the volume somehow reflects the current disunity of this project: it goes through the fields listed above, including several surveys, a number of success stories and a few conceptual discussions of the pros and cons of this emerging approach as opposed to mainstream cognitive science. The main division, for the purposes of this review, is between the analysis of, so to speak, lower and higher cognitive processes. The former are covered in sections 2-4, namely: “Robotics and Autonomous Agents”, “Perceiving and Acting” and “A Dynamic Brain”. These three sections exemplify several tenets that the editors present as distinctive in the embodied approach. For instance, the claim about perception being active and action perceptually guided is explored in chapters dealing with a control system for human avatars (ch. 8), an analysis of the use of inconsistent visual information for the control of our actions (ch. 11), experimental evidence on visual processes guiding sorting tasks (ch. 10) and, finally, a dynamical system model of the interaction of the neural network, the body and the environment of an evolutionary agent featuring visually guided object discrimination (ch. 6).

The evidence presented in these three sections is fascinating, at least for readers like me without any competence in the topics addressed therein. However, it is not presented in the systematic fashion you would expect from a Handbook. It is more a collection of papers representing the diversity of perspectives announced in the Introduction, but they rarely engage with the claims made by each other. The editors have a point when they call for an empirical comparison of the different post-cognitive hypotheses in order to ponder their merit within the joint agenda (p. 15). But such comparison rarely features in the Handbook, which is perhaps an accurate portrait of the state of the art in this field.

Nonetheless, we should grant that the evidence accumulated at these lower levels of cognitive activity is compelling enough to reconsider several traditional tenets about them. E.g., whereas in the traditional approach (both in philosophy and in cognitive science) vision was most often understood as yielding “internal representations for general-purpose use”, the brick-sorting experiment presented in chapter 10 compellingly suggests that eye movements are task-oriented instead. The evidence for this hypothesis is provided by an experimental setup in which subjects operate in a virtual environment wearing a head mounted display tracking their eye movements and manipulating a mechanical arm with their hands. Variations in the visual cues of the bricks during the sorting task revealed, for instance, that the subjects retrieved the relevant information either from the scene or from their working memory. An implicit cost function regulating visual attention seems to be at work here, even if we still do not know much about the mechanism implementing it. It probably evaluates such aspects as metabolic cost, cognitive load, temporal urgency, etc. The subjects themselves are certainly unaware of it being at work. According to Calvo and Gomila (p. 12), in this experiment perceptions seems to be more than building visual representations: it seems active and guides action in quite a straightforward manner.

However, as the authors of chapter 10 (Droll and Hayhoe) point out the evidence presented is not contradictory with “formal models of executive control in which high-level decision processes [about the relevant visual parameters] affect lower level sensory selection” (p. 202). In other words, these experiments can also be interpreted as speaking for a certain continuity/compatibility between embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. The former may well help us in reconsidering certain low level cognitive activities, but maybe at a higher scale the latter may still play a role. This is the problem that the editors dub “scaling-up”: can we explain high level cognition in an embodied fashion? This is the topic of sections 5-7, which cover “Embodied Meaning”, “Emotion and Social Interaction” and a general discussion of the transition from lower to higher levels of cognition.

In chapter 15, Lotte Meteyard and Gabriela Vigliocco present a wonderful review of the embodied theories of semantic representation. As they recall, in this approach, we apprehend linguistic meaning simulating the sensory-motor information produced by the referent of a word or a proposition. They distinguish between stronger and weaker versions of this approach according to the degree to which semantic content depends on this sensory-motor information (what the authors call their engagement hypothesis), reviewing the available evidence (namely behavioral and neurological) for or against each version. The authors conclude that there is a tie between them, but the evidence speaks against those who deny the engagement hypothesis and claim absolute independence between semantic and sensory-motor information. Chapter 16 presents one particular approach to embodied meaning, stemming from the Neural Theory of Language project, taking concept learning as case in point. The two remaining chapters in this section on embodied meaning deal with mathematics: in the former, Rafael Núñez applies a metaphorical approach to mathematics he developed with Lakoff to the analysis of axiomatic systems; in the latter, Arthur Glenberg draws out the practical implications of this approach for the teaching of mathematics. This Handbook is mainly aimed at practitioners of the cognitive sciences, but, all in all, this is probably the section that impinges most on the main tenets of mainstream analytic philosophy and I miss a straightforward discussion of the philosophical “paradigm shift” implicit in its claims.

There is quite a contrast between sections 6 and 7. In the former, on “Scaling up” , two of the three papers compiled seem quite deflationary, at least if we measure by the standards of the editors. In chapter 19, Margaret Wilson explores the possible mechanisms by which abstract de-contextualized thought may have emerged from sensorimotor abilities applied to immediate situations. However, she argues explicitly against reducing human cognition to situated cognition, which, in principle, leaves some room for traditional approaches to the former. In a similar vein, Michael Anderson (ch. 21) analyses brain imaging results showing cognitive overlaps between different areas of the brain and discusses to what extent these images speak unambiguously for embodied cognition. E.g., there is evidence that perceiving objects an object names activate brain regions associated with grasping. But this may be explained as a result of the redeployment of neural circuits across different domains in the evolution of our brain. Some sort of functional inheritance would often ensue as a result, without any further implication about their “embodied” connection.

The tone in the two papers compiled in section 7 is inflationary, by contrast. For instance, Shaun Gallagher (ch. 22) argues for an embodied alternative to standard theories of mind, in which we would not need belief or desire attribution to understand each other’s actions. This understanding would often be primary, originating in body expressions that we would apprehend directly through perception without mental representations. Gallaguer’s paper puts forward a different worldview than the sort of empirically informed hypotheses that abound in this volume. However, it is worth reading, even if just to have a flavor of what a fully embodied approach would entail ―even more so for M. Sheets-Johnstone final chapter.

The volume ends abruptly or, at least, I miss a final overview taking stock of all the evidence compiled and assessing the viability of the research program outlined by the editors in the introduction. The only general discussion can be found at the beginning, in the first two chapters ―therefore written without any explicit reference to the volume. M. Bickhard presents a conceptual argument against standard models of representation in cognitive science: they cannot account, he claims, for the possibility that the organism detects and corrects its own errors. Following Bickhard, if we ground representations on embodied interaction instead, it is possible to account for errors. Interactions involve a circular causal flow between the system and the environment, according to a range of indicated possibilities. Errors will be detected by the system when this range is violated in the interaction. Again, we may wonder how this error-detection model applies to higher level representations, but the volume is not very rich on suggestions about this particular point.

Hence, the only really general discussion of the project in the volume is Andy Clark’s paper on “Embodiment in explanation” (ch.2). Clark defends a somewhat conservative position: mainstream cognitive science should take into account the many findings of the embodied approach, without abandoning its current paradigm. Clark’s argument is based on a review of a significant sample of current research. Had he used the evidence compiled in this Handbook, it would have made an excellent conclusion. His conservatism originates in his skepticism regarding the possibility of a total identification between an agent’s experience and the underlying sensorimotor exercise, as it is often assumed in the most radical versions of the embodied approach ―for instance, the connection between bodily experience and our basic conceptual repertoire, as it is sometimes presented by Lakoff and Johnson.

This Handbook certainly feeds Clark’s skepticism. Despite the effort of the editors, I cannot discern in the papers compiled the possibility of building a general paradigm for cognitive science, impinging on the very foundations of our many theories of social interaction. But I may be just short-sighted. Nonetheless, it is a good invitation to rethink many deeply rooted assumptions across the social sciences.

{February 2011}
{Philosophy of the social sciences }

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex At Dawn. The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, New York, Harper Collins, 2010

This is a book about a subject almost everyone in American and European universities has a personal stake in: monogamy. And it is quite critical of it. With books like this, reviewers should perhaps start disclosing their conflicts of interest, so readers could discount the biases in their assessment. Maybe I will be critical just because my partner cheated on me and I cannot help feeling personally offended by the authors’ case. Or maybe I will praise it in order to justify my own non-monogamous desires. The book is dedicated by the authors to “all our relations” so you may guess right from the start whose side are they on -they do not say much about themselves. So let me dedicate in turn this review to my own relations and we will be even.

Sex at Dawn is indeed an argument against those who consider monogamy our most natural family arrangement. Or, to be more precise, against the most rational among them, the scientifically inspired monogamists. Ryan and Jethá (a psychologist and physician) target the “standard” account of monogamy among evolutionary psychologist, which they probably consider the strongest case for it. They try to debunk it, under the assumption (I guess) that if the reader is convinced by their argument s/he will become more open-minded about non-monogamous family arrangements. As they put it themselves, the most important practical consequence of reading this book should be for couples to openly speak about the meaning of being faithful to each other.

For evolutionary psychologists (the authors apologize for the simplification and I concur), monogamy would be the best way for males to make sure that they are really fathering their female partner’s kids; these latter would obtain in exchange their help in raising them. Both partners will try to cheat on each other to increase their reproductive success through sexual competition: men will try to mate with as many other women as possible hoping that someone else will help in raising their own progeny; women with less desirable partners will try to get pregnant with more successful males, making the former raise the kids. On the grounds of this biological equilibrium, our species would have arranged different cultural variations of the same theme (monogamy).

The authors do not question sexual competition, but claim it operates at a different scale. Drawing on evidence from anthropology (hunter-gatherer societies) and ethology (primates), the authors argue that our species evolved forming promiscuous groups whose members had non-exclusive sex with each other as a bonding mechanism and cooperated in raising their progeny. Sexual competition would occur inside the vagina where sperm from different men would “fight” each other chemically for fecundating the ovule with the non-neutral intervention of the host’s organs. In other words, we would be capable of living in non-monogamous cooperative arrangements, enjoying less sexual frustration, letting our cells do the sexual competition for us behind our back.

Sperm competition in humans is controversial: I admit it as a possibility but a popular science book is probably not the best source to make a conclusive case. The evidence provided in Sex at Down is nonetheless entertaining to read (if you are unfamiliar with this literature) and discuss with your friends. I often found myself disagreeing with the way in which the authors present it, time and again bringing grist to their mill, sometimes at the expenses of fairness and accuracy –e.g., we have data about the quality of our semen and throughout the last fifty years it seems to decrease, but can we really extrapolate this recent trend to the very origins of monogamy, thousands of years ago? (Was semen really so good then?). On a more theoretical note, since this is a book about “the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality”, I miss an account of how monogamy came to prevail. We know it starts with agriculture, but how come it has lasted this long despite all its drawbacks? Monogamy may make us unhappy, but perhaps there is a trade-off and we are getting something in exchange. Almost every piece of evidence presented in this book seems to perform evolutionary functions and monogamy should be no exception. But this is just a guess.

My main contention is though that monogamy is no less natural than non-monogamy: since this is a debate among rationalists, we will easily agree that our species does not do supernatural things, especially when it comes to reproduction. Maybe non-monogamous regimes did wonders for us thousands of years ago, but this is not a particularly good argument for bringing them back today. Not that I am against them, mind you, but I do not need to be “historically justified” to try any alternative to monogamy. As a matter of fact, I cannot imagine anybody struggling to stay in a monogamous relationship, just because evolutionary psychologists claim that this is the natural thing to do.

However, I concur with the authors that monogamy is a topic that every couple should discuss rather than take for granted and, all in all, this book is a good place to start the conversation. Given the number of pro-monogamy prejudices we carry with us, it may be fair to load the dice in the other direction.

{March 2011}
{Metapsychology online reviews}

Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique. Un espace non-poppérien de l’argumentation, París, Albin Michel, 2006.

En el prefacio a la segunda edición francesa, Jean-Claude Passeron nos advierte de los múltiples malentendidos que lastraron el debate en torno a Le raisonnement sociologique (LRS ). Creo que la densidad conceptual de la obra explica, si no justifica, muchos de ellos, al menos en mi caso. Pese a las aclaraciones añadidas a esta nueva edición, me temo que sólo puedo contribuir a este debate aportando nuevos malentendidos que le den al autor la oportunidad de elucidarlos. La novedad de estos malentendidos, si es que hay alguna, radica en la diferencia de perspectivas entre Passeron y el autor de estas líneas, muy probablemente generacional. Yo comenzaba mis estudios universitarios cuando se publicaba la primera edición de LRS y leo ahora la segunda después de tan solo una década dedicado a la filosofía de las ciencias sociales. De ahí mi sorpresa no ya ante las tesis metodológicas de LRS, sino ante la justificación que Passeron nos propone.

Una de sus tesis principales, según la (mal)interpreto, es que las ciencias sociales tienen que servirse necesariamente de argumentos informales, pues es imposible aislar de modo unívoco y dar una definición general todas las variables pertinentes para analizar matemáticamente una situación eminentemente singular. Como justificación, Passeron apela a la inviabilidad del ideal científico defendido originalmente por el Círculo de Viena, de un lado, y por Popper, de otro. Como es sabido, este ideal se basaba en una concepción formal de las teorías que se demostró indefendible, por razones que Passeron desarrolla con amplitud en un epílogo que recapitula su propia posición en LRS. Y de ahí mi sorpresa, y quizá el primer malentendido: ¿quién sostenía en 1991 las tesis que Passeron critica?

Me temo que se trata de una querella de sociólogos, más que un debate estrictamente filosófico. A la altura de 1960, autores como Carl Hempel o Ernst Nagel sabían ya de las dificultades de justificar la superioridad del conocimiento científico (frente a la metafísica) a partir de la estructura de sus teorías y ensayaron una nueva vía que es, aparentemente, la que aquí quiere seguir Passeron: analizar en qué condiciones resultan aceptables los distintos tipos de explicación científica, concebidos como otras tantas formas de argumentación. Es decir, pasos inferenciales, no siempre deductivos desde un conjunto de premisas a una conclusión. Durante los últimos 40 años, la filosofía de las ciencias sociales se sirvió ampliamente de esta estrategia generando un cuerpo de debates sobre la potencia argumental de las explicaciones que nos vienen ofreciendo economistas, sociólogos, antropólogos, etc. Y esto es lo que un lector de mi generación/educación habría esperado encontrar en LRS: no tanto la crítica del proyecto positivista original, como una tipología de los argumentos que, según Passeron, caracterizarían el razonamiento sociológico, junto con una discusión de su fortaleza .

Pero se diría que a Passeron le interesa más bien mostrar, a través de sus críticas al formalismo logicista del positivismo, el carácter necesariamente incompleto del formalismo matematizante en ciencias sociales. Y la fuerza de su propio argumento se apoya en las dificultades semánticas de semejantes proyectos: e.g., la imposibilidad de construir un “vocabulario observacional” en el que volcar sin ambigüedad los datos que arroje la investigación empírica, de modo que su acumulación sirva como base para contrastar teorías sociológicas o construir generalizaciones legiformes. Este sería mi segundo malentendido: ¿tienen alguna vigencia estos argumentos o se reeditan, como indica el autor (p. 22), simplemente para documentar la Historia de los debates metodológicos en Francia? En una época en la que la explotación sistemática de bases de datos y los experimentos sobre decisiones individuales son ya objeto de conversación popular gracias a éxitos de venta como Freakonomics o Predictably irrational, ¿cabe sostener todavía las posiciones de LRS tal como se formularon en 1991? Los más críticos con semejantes empresas son justamente los teóricos más formalistas en las ciencias sociales (los economistas), pues ponen de manifiesto cómo con un aparato teórico mínimo es posible extraer conclusiones interesantes a partir de datos estadísticos ajenos a la propia teoría. Por usar el famoso ejemplo de Levitt, los patrones de respuesta observados en los miles de cuestionarios realizados en las escuelas de Chicago permiten conjeturar qué profesores hacen trampa y rectifican los exámenes de sus alumnos para evitar ser penalizados por sus bajos resultados. ¿Por qué no habríamos de aceptar el contenido de esta base de datos como un vocabulario observacional de uso común en ciencias sociales?

La respuesta no está, creo, en el Círculo de Viena o en sus más inmediatos epígonos, sino en la tradición hoy más viva en filosofía de la ciencia, cuyos orígenes se remontan nuevamente a la década de 1960. Fue entonces cuando autores como Patrick Suppes se preguntaron si las dificultades que plantea el problema de la carga teórica de la observación (extensamente discutido en LRS) no se atenuarían si se recurre al álgebra, antes que a la lógica, para analizar las teorías científicas. Con ello se abandonaría, por un lado, la perspectiva lingüística que dominó la tradición positivista y, por otro, se podría tratar con mayor fidelidad la práctica científica en la que predomina el uso de modelos. Suppes llamó la atención sobre la existencia de modelos centrados exclusivamente en el procesamiento de datos empíricos (e.g., estadísticos) y, por tanto, independientes de las teorías que se aplican sobre ellos. Es decir, no absolutamente independientes respecto de cualquier teoría, pero sí respecto del aparato conceptual que se ha de aplicar sobre tales modelos de datos. Su intuición fue ampliamente desarrollada tanto en la escuela de Stanford (Cartwright, Hacking, etc.) como, formalmente, por el enfoque estructuralista (Sneed, Moulines, etc.). Así, en el caso de las bases de datos utilizadas por Levitt no pueden presumirse sesgos de la teoría económica en su generación (aunque haya otros) y en esa medida es interesante su análisis económico, por minimalista que sea el aparato teórico del autor.

Una de las principales virtudes de estos modelos de datos es la de exhibir regularidades fenomenológicas que aparecen en los datos obtenidos a partir de experimentos y otros estudios empíricos. Puede que no contemos todavía con teorías generales para dar cuenta de tales regularidades y su alcance es, desde luego, contextual. Pero su sola existencia permite el tipo de debates metodológicos que LRS parece declarar impracticables :

La vulnerabilidad y, por tanto, la pertinencia empíricas de los enunciados sociológicos sólo pueden ser definidas en una situación de extracción de información sobre el mundo que es la de la observación histórica, nunca la de la experimentación (LRS, p. 554, traducción de J. L. Moreno Pestaña).

Una réplica inmediata a mi objeción es que me este tipo de regularidades quizá existan en otros dominios de las ciencias sociales, pero no en sociología. Como antes apuntaba, Passeron defiende la historicidad del análisis sociológico de un modo tal que parece no haber lugar para aislar regularidades en los datos agregados o las decisiones individuales. Creo que esta posición se deriva, en buena parte, de una actitud anti-naturalista muy arraigada en sociología (e.g., p. 81), para la cual la universalidad que podemos encontrar en ciertos patrones de decisión de un agente no sería objeto propio de la disciplina. Pero la oleada naturalista sobre las ciencias sociales provocada por el desarrollo de la etología y la neurología durante las dos últimas décadas está poniendo de manifiesto que dentro de la Historia hay espacio para explicaciones que parten directamente de nuestra constitución biológica. Por ejemplo, nuestra miopía para estimar en qué medida se renuevan los recursos ecológicos de los que dependen nuestras sociedades, documentada sistemáticamente a lo largo de los siglos en los casos reunidos por Jared Diamond en Colapso . Los efectos sociales de este déficit cognitivo han sido ampliamente discutidos por los historiadores, pero sólo cuando incorporamos una perspectiva evolucionista sobre nuestra psicología podemos entender con precisión el mecanismo generador de esta miopía ―en lugar de atribuírselo a nuestra irracionalidad, rapacidad, etc. Cuál sea su alcance de este tipo de análisis para la Historia está todavía en discusión, pero su impacto parece suficiente como para reconsiderar si la historicidad debe cifrarse tan sólo en la ausencia de repeticiones espontáneas o en la imposibilidad de aislar las variables relevantes en un laboratorio .

No sé si acierto en mi lectura de LRS, pero no estoy en desacuerdo con las tesis de Passeron: las ciencias sociales se han de servir necesariamente de argumentos informales, cuyo alcance depende, generalmente, del contexto y su aplicación empírica está condicionada por la dificultad de controlar los factores causales que controlan los acontecimientos analizados. El problema es que, así enunciadas, no se me ocurren hoy muchos partidarios de las tesis contrarias. Y, por otro lado, los argumentos de los que se sirve para justificarlas me resultan menos convincentes que las alternativas que vengo enumerando. Los argumentos importan, pues señalan el auténtico alcance del desacuerdo: si actualizamos las referencias de Passeron para incluir el enfoque semántico en filosofía de la ciencia y limamos su anti-naturalismo, tendríamos un espacio argumental “anti-popperiano” en el que cabe una sociología que se apoyase en regularidades empíricas construidas a partir de análisis estadísticos y experimentos para construir explicaciones apelando, entre otros, a mecanismos biológicos propios de toda la especie. No es precisamente la que Passeron practica y defiende en LRS, ni tampoco pretendo yo ahora defender tal alternativa sociológica. Simplemente creo que sus argumentos no son lo suficientemente poderosos para excluir semejante alternativa y, me temo, que si uno concede más peso al debate metodológico actual que a Windelband y el Círculo de Viena no queda más remedio que tomarla en consideración. Otra cosa es que a los sociólogos les interese, pero eso no me corresponde a mí juzgarlo.

[Debate en la RES a propósito de la versión castellana de J. Moreno Pestaña, de próxima aparición en Siglo XXI con F. Aguiar y F. Vázquez y respuesta del propio Passeron]

{Enero 2010}
{Revista española de sociología 14 (2010)}