The Evolution of Morality. Introduction and Deontology

Three parts: one | two | three |

"...the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts; and in the case of the lower animals is would be absurd to speak of these instincts as having been developed from selfishness, or for the happiness of the community. They have, however, certainly been developed for the general good of the community."—Charles Darwin. The Descent of Man, 1871.

bonobo

In this multi-part essay I will explore the idea that features of society in social animals—particularly humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos—can give us insights into the evolution of morality. This essay will form a chapter in my forth-coming book which has the working title: Practical Philosophy. This idea has long been promoted by primatologist Frans de Waal.

As a young researcher de Waal noticed that chimps practised reconciliation and peace-making after conflicts and that they displayed empathy and consoling. The paradigms of animal behaviour of the day focussed on violence and aggression, and many zoologists were reluctant to accept that chimps were even capable of emotions, let alone empathy, which was seen as distinctively human. Fortunately de Waal persisted with observing actual behaviour and describing what he saw.

He discovered that chimpanzee alpha-males often do not hold that position merely by being the biggest, most aggressive animal, although that can happen. Usually the alpha-male is the one who can build and sustain a coalition of support both from males and females. This allows smaller males to become alpha. In fact male chimps, like most male animals, avoid physical confrontation most of the time. About three times stronger than the average human male, chimps have the strength to cause serious and fatal injuries to each other. A male chimp's bite can crack large bones. However, like most male social animals they have a preference for not using their strength against other members of their group. De Waal also discovered that older male chimps will intervene in conflicts to try to defuse them. All of this ran counter to the scientific narratives of the day, and to some extent still runs counter to the popular view of animals. We still seem to think of nature as "red in tooth and claw". In fact social animals prosper by being prosocial. This should be obvious, but somehow it is a surprise.

Like Jane Goodall before him, de Waal has made some discoveries about our close primate cousins that seem startling given what we thought about them based on preconceptions. We have been theory-led rather than observation-led in trying to understand apes. Observation being theory-led seems to be a problem across the field of social studies where researchers often make a virtue out of being committed to an ideology (Freudian-, Foucauldian-, Feminist-, Marxist- etc). When an ideological commitment comes before observation, the chances of understanding what is going on is slim. Paying attention to how the animals actually behave often requires a change in our theoretical understanding of animals, but also of humans. Changing our theoretical understanding is difficult if we are committed to an ideology, because we simply reinterpret observation to fit our beliefs.

The human/animal distinction has been getting thinner and thinner in recent years. Animals use tools, cooperate, have intentionality, theory of mind (higher order intentionality), experience emotions, have empathy, and understand reciprocity. If we break language down into it basic components (articulation, grammar, syntax etc) we find that individually these components are all found in other animals. What is left to make us special?

As a long time fan of Jane Goodall and deeply interested in the subject of morality, on hearing de Waal speak for the first time a few weeks ago (Waal 2016), I was immediately interested by his comments on the prosocial nature of chimpanzee behaviour and the evolution of morality. In this essay I will outline the evolutionary basis of morality based on my reading of de Waal (esp. 2013) and then try to see how this might integrate with my evolving worldview.

~ Deontology and Morality ~

I first want to reiterate the connection between morality and obligation in line with John Searle's philosophy of social reality, outlined in my recent long essay in five parts (starting here).

Since I often struggle to remember the distinction, let me restate that I take morality to relate to the rules governing relations between people (and possibly animals); and ethics to be the abstract principles behind the rules. Some people talk about meta-ethics—the principles behind the abstract principles which govern creating rules for how we behave—but I'm not sure another layer of abstraction is necessary or meaningful. One of the questions we need to think about with respect to the evolution of morality, is whether both morality and ethics are the products of evolution. Intuitively it is only morality that evolved and ethics is a late abstraction based on intellect. But we shall see.

In Searle's view, society imposes observer relative functions onto people and objects through collective intentionality, or more specifically, by agreeing that the person or object has that function. Such functions are not intrinsic to their physical features, but exist only because of the minds of the observers who conceive of the function. Along with the function comes the status appropriate to carrying out the function (hence the compound term status-function), and an empowerment consistent with that status and function. A £5 note is money because the government declares it so and the citizenry agree to act as if it is. The note is thus empowered to be money and citizens have an obligation to treat it as money. The status which is ontologically subjective (reliant on intentionality) becomes an epistemically objective fact: a £5 is money. Sellers are bound to accept money as payment for goods and services. The government has a duty to manage the supply of money. "Seller" and "government" are also status-functions, demonstrating that each status-function operates within a network of interrelated status-functions.

The imposition of a status-function on a person also imposes rights, duties, and obligations on that person. For example, Elizabeth Windsor counts as Queen Elizabeth the Second, head of state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as New Zealand, Australia, and Canada; this is true in the context of her being the oldest child of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Note that Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was Queen by marriage rather than succession and is thus not numbered amongst the heads of state. Citizens acknowledge Elizabeth as Queen and many institutions are built around cultivating (or demanding) and reinforcing this acknowledge; aka pomp and pagentry. As Queen, Elizabeth is moderately rich, though she is not in the top 300 of the Times' Rich List, and she and her family live in relative luxury. However, she has many rights, duties and obligations. In many ways her life is governed by antiquated formality and ritual, and she has almost no power over her subjects any more. in many ways her only power is to insist on the formality associated with her status-function. Each year she has the humiliation of reading a speech written for her outlining her government's legislative program. It composed by spin doctors in the awful political jargon of the day and sounds increasingly bizarre and anachronistic in the mouth of a 90 year old woman. Some citizens are against the institution of the monarchy. If these people were a large majority, they could vote to discontinue the institution. It is likely that Australia, New Zealand, and Canada will become republics at some point as the connection to the UK, whence the founding colonists embarked, becomes more and more tenuous. A person is constrained by society to act in ways that are consistent with their status-functions. If they persist in behaving differently, their status-functions can change (as with the impeachment of President Nixon). The Queen is only queen with the agreement of her subjects; she can easily be overthrown (c.f. the French Revolution and the revolt of the US colonies). Many people feel the crown prince, Charles, will not make a good king and discuss the possibility of bypassing him in favour of his children (though this is not allowed by the current rules).

Although people like the Queen have very obvious status-functions, in fact all of our lives are structured, and our identities defined, by the many socially imposed status-functions that apply to us. Our behaviour is regulated by obligations entailed by such status-functions. We learn from day one to subject ourselves to the expectations of society. Certain behaviours are rewarded and others are punished. In the grey areas, we may choose for ourselves. Society is constituted by a network of status-functions and the attendant reciprocal obligations. The network is also a network of conventional power: statuses, functions, and their attendant obligations are imposed and policed by the group. A person is empowered to act or prohibited from doing so. In situations where our actions are seen as having a moral connotation, i.e. in our behaviour towards other people, we are moral to the extent that we fulfil our rights, duties, and obligations to other group members. Morality is effectively obeying the authorisations and prohibitions imposed by society. Some of these may have reasons that go beyond mere convention and be based on the imperatives of social living. This is where we might find some cross over between Searle and de Waal.

According to de Waal we could not enforce morality if we did not already have moral tendencies. We see this in unenforceable laws, for example laws against recreational drug use. Humans enjoy experiences such as intoxication, euphoria, and even hallucinations. Many animals are also known to seek out these experiences. Prohibition has created a huge and lucrative black market, often run by criminal gangs who use extreme violence to control their market. But even quite harsh punishments do not eliminate the use of drugs in most societies. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug use in the USA have tripled the prison population since the 1980s, UK prisons are overflowing (to the point of causing riots); billions of dollars have been spent on policing and paramilitary operations during the so-called War on Drugs; and hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Despite this, we cannot even keep drugs out of prisons. Humans have a propensity for taking mind- and mood-altering chemicals and laws against doing so are effectively unenforceable. So moral law has to be founded on a moral propensity or it fails to regulate behaviour. 

The social lifestyle is clearly a very successful evolutionary strategy for primates. The basic idea of this essay is that looking at how different social primates—particularly humans, chimps, and bonobos—manage their social groups will shed light on how morality might have evolved. By showing that certain types of social behaviours are common to us all and how these are related to moral virtues, we can get some insights into how morality emerged from addressing the challenges of a social lifestyle.

Certain features of behaviour seem to be necessary for social living in mammals. Social insects have quite a different dynamic, though David Sloan Wilson (2004) has argued for revisiting how we see bees. Each social primate species has distinctive ways of dealing with the problems that living in a group creates, however, there are common features and these boil down to two qualities: reciprocity and empathy. Following de Waal (2013), I'll refer to these the Two Pillars of Morality and devote the next two parts of this essay to them respectively. Under the heading of reciprocity, I will also discuss altruism; and under empathy, I will discuss conflict management. Although in de Waal's view these two special cases fit under their respective headings, I think by highlighting them we get a better sense of how morality might have evolved. It is as if there are two major pillars and two minor pillars.

~~oOo~~

Three parts: one | two | three |

~ Bibliography ~

Covers all three parts of this essay

Boesch, C., et al. (2016), Chimpanzees routinely fish for algae with tools during the dry season in Bakoun, Guinea. American Journal of Primatology. doi:10.1002/ajp.22613

Darwin, Charles (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. (2 Vols). London: John Murray.

Del Testa, David W. (2014). Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists. Routledge.

Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Kay, John (2016). The monumental folly of rent-seeking. Financial Times. 20 Nov 2016.

Lakoff, George (1995). Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich. (1848). The Communist Manifesto. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Sloan Wilson, David. (2004). The New Fable of the Bees: Multilevel Selection, Adaptive Societies, and the Concept of Self Interest, in Evolutionary Psychology and Economic TheoryAdvances in Austrian Economics, Volume 7, 201–220. doi:10.1016/S1529-2134(04)07009-7 http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DSW10.pdf

Waal, Frans de. (2011) Moral behavior in animals. TEDx Peachtree. [Filmed Nov 2011; 16:52]. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

Waal, Frans de. (2016) The Life Scientific. [Interview with Jim Al-Khalili on BBC Radio4, broadcast 4 Oct 2016]. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wt6bj

Norms without Conscious Rule Following. Social reality (V)

This is Part V of five. Part I is here.

“It is the duty of every citizen/resident of any country, nationals as well as expatriates to know the basics of the governing laws of the country one resides. Ignorance of the law or unawareness cannot be pleaded to escape liability.” ― Henrietta Newton Martin

The drift of Searle's philosophy of society to this point may well seem overly rational, mechanistic even. Institutional facts are constituted by rules, which invoke rights, duties, and obligations, and these define who we are and how we behave. Even if we allow that the rules of society evolved organically or that we follow rules unconsciously, there remains some doubt about how accurate a picture this can be. 

Perhaps it is only observing that people seem to break rules all the time, whether by accident or design, but rule-following humans seems a doubtful ideal at best. Or perhaps it is the fact that few people know, or can know, more than the basic outlines of the laws that govern their daily lives. Or that an anthropologist can write a book about social customs that are transparent to the people who live by them quite religiously, but opaque and obscure to outsiders (see for example, Kate Fox's Watching the English). The fact is that we intuitively know the informal, unspoken, rules of our society, but we'd all struggle to list them. It takes a skilled anthropologist many hours of situation-specific, close observation to figure some of them out. We seem to just know how to behave and what we can usually get away with. Even our objections to bad behaviour don't reference explicit rules. We don't cite chapter and verse, we just say "uh-uh, no." or "that's rude!" or whatever.

Searle believes our behaviour is often consistent with, and even shaped by, social rules, without having direct recourse to them. However, before we can address this issue directly, we need to establish another plank in Searle's philosophy. So far he has identified three essential aspects to society: observer relative functions, collective intentionality, and deontic powers. All that we have done so far, all the conclusions we have reached, emerge on the basis of understanding these three concepts and how they interact. Now we need to introduce a fourth concept: background capabilities or simply the background .

~ The Background ~

For intentional states to make sense, humans must make use of contextualising information. This involves metaphysical concepts like space, time, and causation (à la Kant); but also familiarity with social and physical environments. Take the example of the verb "cut". If I ask you to cut the cake and you fire up the lawn mower, then you've made a mistake. Similarly if I ask you to cut the grass and you whip out a carving knife. The verb cut is ambiguous and we have to be sensitive to the conditions: cutting grass and cutting cakes are similar actions, but require different tools and different methods. There are several other object/tool specific meanings of cut: cutting trees (chainsaw/axe); cutting hair (scissors), cutting a hedge (clippers); but also metaphorical uses, e.g. cutting school, cutting code, cutting the cheese, and so on. But if you are a native English speaker, you've probably never tried to cut a cake with a lawnmower.

English is especially rich in such variety and thus ambiguity, but all languages have it to some extent. The lack of a one-to-one relationship between language and the world vexed many a philosopher of the past and many attempts have been made to eliminate synonyms and ambiguity from natural language or to construct artificial languages which lack it from the outset (See Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language). However, the first generation of children who speak a language immediately start introducing ambiguity again.  

What this shows is that we do not interpret sentences only at the level of bare semantic content, it's not enough to know what cut means in general sense, one has to understand from the context which act of cutting is being referred to and adjust one's understanding accordingly. This is to say that we understand language pragmatically also. For a native English speaker the distinctions in the use of cut are understood effortless and the kinds of mistakes I noted about for cut seldom if ever occur. We don't hear the word cut and then consult an inner table of the possible meanings and sometimes chose the wrong sense. In fact, we hear the sentence and we just know which sense is intended. The meaning of most spoken sentences is simply apparent to us effortlessly and in the moment (or perhaps even slightly before the moment).

In George Lakoff's theory of categorisation, words invoke frames that consist of relevant image schemas and metaphors. The frame "cake" involves a prototypical cake and the relation of any specific cake to that prototype. The frame of "cake" also consists of all of the actions that we associate with tree: baking, decorating, eating, and, of course, cutting. "Cut" also invokes a frame. Cutting the cake is the overlap of the categories and frames. Again our ability to invoke appropriate frames seems effortless. We just known how objects fit into our world.

Expectation is a considerable part of perception (see also comments under the heading "Cognition and Time", in my essay The Citta Bottleneck. 1 Jul 2016). Expectation helps us to parse sentences in real time, and provides an easy avenue for humour, where the punch-line of a story disrupts our expectations we tend to find it funny. Here's a couple of my favourite one-liners from the inimitable Milton Jones:

Italians, eh? With their slanty little eyes... no wait, that's italics.

So I phoned up the spiritual leader of Tibet, he sent me a large goat with a long neck... turns out I phoned dial a llama.

We can anticipate where a sentence is going, using clues from our knowledge of the social context and the present conversation. It's much harder when we don't know someone well. Someone who has only recently learned a language and does have to resort to referencing memorised rules, cannot cope with the speed of natural conservations between native speakers. "Speak more slowly" is one of the most useful phrases for a beginner learning a new language. 

Something similar happens for perceptions (see Rolf Degen's blog). As Searle puts it, when we perceive something "the perceiver assimilates the perceived object to some more or less familiar category" (133). Though he is not referencing Lakoff directly, the crossover is obvious. If I see a parade including a great dane, a german shepherd, a beagle, a dachshund, and a chihuahua I have no problem identifying all these as types of dog (nor do they have a difficulty, because they all smell like dogs) and relating them to my prototypical dog. Searle's point is that this aspect of familiarity is effortless and transparent. Most of the time, we are not following any classification rules either consciously or unconsciously. We just know, because assimilating new experience to our existing set of categories and frames, gives it an aspect of familiarity. We can analyse how categories work as Lakoff does, but in daily life our use of categories is mostly effortless and transparent. I see an unfamiliar breed of dog, and I just know it's a dog of some kind. I'm not going through a check-list comparing the dog with features of a conscious prototype or anything like that.

Anyone who has travelled will know the simultaneous feeling of familiarity and unfamiliarity. For example, when you get off a plane in India having come from Britain, the differences can be striking: the heat, the different languages, the smells, etc; but then you still line up at customs and immigration, show your passport to a functionary, walk out and collect your baggage; catch a taxi to a hotel, drive in a car, along streets; see houses, people, trees, animals. In a city like New Delhi one can get by with only English, find a wifi hotspot, visit an excellent museum,buy an espresso, and eat a meal, just as you might do in London or Birmingham; but then be unsettled by a cow wandering down the street, a beggar suffering from some horrible skin disease, or a passer-by spitting a vast quantity red paan juice onto the footpath.  Everything is different and familiar at the same time.

Of course things can get a bit vague at the edges. There are cases when we are not sure what something is. Our first response to a a completely novel experience is to try slot it into what we already know, or at least relate it to the categories we have available. The more novel experiences we have, the more we can expand the range of categories we have available to categorise experience. This is why we talk about mind-expanding experiences, and count travel as one of the more significant of them.

In both cases—language and perception—there is a lot of background processing going on that helps make sense of our intentional mental states. But these processes are not themselves intentional or conscious. Often these are not processes that we could bring to consciousness. We've noted three background capabilities already: interpreting spoken language; interpreting perceptions; and the aspect of familiarity. Why aren't the background capacities just the same as following rules unconsciously? 

~ The Rules ~

There is a real problem with the idea that people follow rules that determine their behaviour. Searle puts it like this:

"Here is our paradox: We want a causal explanation that will explain the intricacy, the complexity, and the sensitivity of our behavior as well as explaining its spontaneity, creativity, and originality. But we only have two paradigms of causal explanation, and neither seems adequate to explain the relations of individuals to social structures. One is the paradigm of rational decision making according to rules, principles, and the like, and the other is brute physical causation and therefore non-intentionalistic and not rationalistic." (141)

I've focussed on Searle's example of money, so let's continue with that one. What do we know about money so far? It is an ontologically objective fact that a £5 note exists in the form of paper/plastic and ink. However, money per se is ontologically subjective. The £5 note is money because we agree that the note represents wealth, where wealth means control of things agreed to be of value. But it is also an epistemically objective fact that a £5 note is money. There is no need to justify using a £5 note in exchange for goods and services, because it is universally acknowledged that a £5 note does represent wealth. Such facts cannot be grounded in physical reality, only in social reality. How we feel about having a £5 in our wallet is epistemically subjective.

The system of money is very complex. In the UK the government delegates monetary policy to the quasi-independent Bank of England, founded in 1694 to fund the then King's overseas wars. The Bank of England manipulates the value of a pound by setting base interest rates, by printing money, and by buying up debts from other banks (aka quantitative easing). The Bank of England is managed by a Governor and a monetary policy committee who regulate and supervise the money supply. They also supervise the minting and printing of currency. Our currency is traded on international markets and it is currently plunging in value against the Euro! Then there is a whole body of law dedicated the process of exchanging money for goods and services, including consumer protection, advertising practices, and so on. 

Most of us who use money are at best only vaguely aware of how the system of money works. We may from time to time check to see if a particular note is legitimate and not a counterfeit, but mostly we use money without any reference to the underlying reality or otherwise of money, wealth, or value. We do not reference the rules for the creation of money or wealth or value; nor the more detailed rules of exchanging money for goods and services. When we hand over a £5 in exchange for a purchase in a shop, no negotiation necessary: customer and clerk simply exchange one for the other despite the volumes of laws that govern the transaction. 

The system of money is almost entirely transparent to most people, most of the time. Indeed people can be completely mistaken about the nature of money and still participate in the system. For example people may believe that they can still exchange money for gold if they turn up at the treasury; or that money is only created by the government (just 3% of money is cash and 97% takes the form of debts issued by banks). A lot of people still think that banks lend from deposits, which hasn't been true since the founding of the Bank of England. When we take it out of our wallet to pay for a pint of almond milk, we may be completely unaware of all the many factors that impact the value of our £5 note, from inflation/deflation, to international trade and exchange rates. This doesn't stop us using money. As long as we can identify the face value of the tokens and count, then we can use money. 

The point is that when we use money we are not referencing the rules of money. We may not even know the rules that govern the creation, supply, and value of money and we could even have erroneous beliefs on these subjects that would not hamper us. When we learn about money as a child, we mainly learn how to count tokens and to reckon what change we're owed. If we are lucky we learn the value of money and the virtue of saving money. More likely these days we end up in debt and paying a substantial fraction of our income to a bank as interest payments for the rest of our lives. In fact most transactions these days involve waving a bit of plastic with a microchip at a sensor and don't involve physical currency at all. The physical representation of money is as bits on a disk in a server farm that could literally be anywhere in the world.

So the idea that the use of money is an example of rule-following behaviour is really nonsensical. With some effort we can discover what the rules are. We can describe the rules. And the rules do in some sense dictate how money works, but the rules do not prescribe our behaviour, even though to use money effectively our behaviour must be consistent with the rules! And we haven't even touched on the fact that people deliberately break all the rules pertaining to money.

There is a strong parallel here with grammar. Language is highly susceptible to analysis into semantic units, syntax, and grammar. Rules for language use can be discovered and described in great detail. The first example of this is a text called, Aṣṭādhyāyī. This a grammar of Sanskrit written ca. 300 BCE by the Gandhāran scholar, Pāṇini. However, when we are speaking, we are not following rules. In an animated conversation, sentences fly back an forth at speed with no time for rule based analysis. Every adult who learns a new language starts off learning the rules of spelling, syntax and grammar. They consciously parse sentences. They may attain a certain level of fluency. When they meet native speakers they find that the conversation goes too fast for them to consciously parse what is being said. Conscious rule-following is too slow for real life. Doesn't this just mean that we follow rules unconsciously?

In order for us to unconsciously follow the rules, we would have to know what the rules are. As I have already pointed out, most people have only a very basic idea of how money works and a substantial portion of those have a false idea of how money works. But this does not stop them from using money. I have used money in New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, USA, India and the UK. I don't have any specific knowledge of how money works in any of these except the UK, because I only started to pay attention to such things after I emigrated. 

When I paid 10 Baht to catch the monorail in Bangkok, I just picked out a 10 Baht note and handed it over in exchange for a ticket. My ticket allowed me onto the train. The train took me to a stop by the river and later back to my hotel. I have no idea how the Thai government manages its money supply. In fact I didn't know a single word in a Thai language. Money is simply money. Tickets are tickets. Trains are trains. I have the requisite background capabilities to use a train pretty much anywhere, though India was a stretch, not because of how their money works, but because of the sheer number of people and trains.

Similarly I learned to speak English as a child and was never presented with detailed grammatical lessons at school. At best I could identify a verb and a noun, but I had no reason to do so most of the time. The first time I even thought of this as a disadvantage was long after I had completely 5 years of university education and I met some students who were learning English as a second language. They asked me a grammatical question about a part of speech. I had no idea how to explain which form to use, though I knew with certainty which form was correct in the example they gave me. I had no rules to refer to, but I just knew the right form to use. It was not until I taught myself Pāḷi from Warder's book An Introduction to Pali, that I got any substantial education in grammar. Later I studied Sanskrit at Cambridge University my teacher taught me how to systematically parse a sentence. I learned rules of grammar and how to consciously apply those rules to analyse an unfamiliar sentence. As a result I became competent in unravelling Pāḷi sentences. I can now do a basic analysis of an English sentence. But I didn't need this ability in order to use the language. 

Searle uses the example of baseball. When you first learn to play baseball, you have to memorise the rules: bases, innings, sides, pitcher, batter, catcher, fielder, strikes, fouls, catches, in, out, runs, turns etc. One has to coordinate the physical actions required to play the game. But people who get good at baseball, or any skill-set, forget about the rules and just play. The rules guide the development of dispositions that result in behaviour that generally follows the rules without being rule-based. This is why sports need an umpire or referee, someone whose job is to consciously keep track of the rules and make sure play is legal. Athletes play to the best of their ability, but they often inadvertently break the rules. If sports were a matter of following rules, they would proceed a lot more slowly, and there would be fewer fouls. Of course sometimes players deliberately commit fouls—so-called professional fouls or cheating as it is more commonly known—but most examples of rule breaking are inadvertent. Good players are relying on background capabilities to guide their actions and keep their efforts within the rules of the game, while they think more strategically. In team sports the players are not only playing their own game, but also have to keep track of what the others are doing, not to mention the opposition. 

When learning any new skill, we start off learning rules, and our performance is halting and often inaccurate. But if we get good at anything, if we attain fluency, the skill must be transferred to the background, it becomes a background capability.

What kind of mechanism would support this? The idea of rule following would require the law to be encoded in our brains, and decisions on behaviour to be constantly assessing which rules, and sets of rules, are applicable and then referencing the content of those rules in order to formulate an action. This is the model of the brain as computer. But it turns out that the brain is not a computer, at least not in how it approaches the rules of society or sport. It is, not surprisingly, rather more like a neural network (See de Bono 1990).

We know that the micro-structures of the brain are constantly changing in response to experience (Kolb et al 2003). Learning and memory, are not simply a matter of storing and retrieving information in a static brain. The brain is not simply a container, but is changed by experience. When we learn, neurons grow new dendrites and new synapses are formed. It's also possible that entire new neurons grow, though the macro-structure of the brain does not change after we reach physical maturity. As we continue to perform an action like counting money, learning a language, driving a car, or playing baseball, there is a corresponding change in the brain at the cellular level. Connections between neurons increase in density. Skills that are neglected correlate with a corresponding reduction in connection density. The neurophysiology of learning and memory thus support Searle's contention that we are not usually referencing remembered rules, but rather relying on dispositions (or strengthened neural pathways) that develop once we learn the rules and reinforce them through repeated performance of related actions. With these dispositions in place we begin to behave in ways that are consistent with the rules, without actually referencing the rules. There is usually a point of mastery of a skill were we cease thinking consciously how to do it, and just do it. And this is why we just know how to behave without reference to rules, even though rules exist and out behaviour is consistent with those rules.

With this last plank in place we have everything that we need for a philosophy of social reality. The last two chapters of Searle's book are an elaborate defence of Realism, which I won't go into. In any case I have proposed my own defence of Realism (see Buddhism & The Limits of Transcendental Idealism). It remains now to make some final comments on this series of five essays which have introduced and critiqued Searle's social realism. 

~ Final Conclusions ~

By combining four concepts—1. functions, 2. collective intentionality, 3. deontic powers, and 4. the background—we have arrived at a quite sophisticated overview of how societies function.

We can analyse societies in terms of rules of the form, X counts as Y in C. Such a rule describes the situation where collective intentionality accepts or indeed imposes, an observer relative function on an object or individual. Such functions change the status of X in the minds of those who participate in the context. That X counts as Y becomes a fact which is ontologically subjective, but epistemically objective. When everyone agrees that the function applies, then it does apply. A £5 note is money, because everyone involved considers that it it money. This is collective intentionality. In view of this, the £5 note does not just function as money, but it has the status of money as well. It has a status as legal tender and as a symbol of wealth and value. It is necessary that the £5 have the status accorded to money in order to function as money. Therefore we refer to status-functions.

Especially when applied to people, status-functions come with rights, duties, and obligations; i.e. with deontic powers. Status functions thus empower individuals and are governed by conventional power. Prime Minister is an observer relative function. X counts as the PM when they are the leader of the party that won the most recent general election. In the UK this means that if the party leadership changes mid-term, as it did in 2016, then we have a new PM without requiring a new election. Being PM comes with status as the leading executive and chief policy maker of the UK. The head of state approves the new PM by convention. The PM is formally addressed as "Prime Minister"; where the title is an indicator of the status of the person functioning as leader. Some status-functions require indicators such as uniforms or other special clothing and accessories (especially hats), titles, implements, residences, and special deference shown to them by others.

Contra Searle and following de Waal, I argue that rudimentary status-functions exist in chimpanzee and bonobo societies, specifically the alpha-male and/or alpha-female. However, I agree with Searle that the possibilities enabled by complex human language overwhelm such rudimentary status-functions and language is constitutive of human societies. Communication in the absence of language is necessarily rudimentary. 

While at times we make rules conscious, most of how society works is through background capabilities. We learn rules as infants and those rules allow us to develop background capabilities and competencies that make our behaviour rule-consistent, without being rule-determined. Our ability to develop these background capacities is what was formerly known as character. Such rules as become apparent to us through analysis of society are not the whole story. For the most part we are not conscious of the rules, nor following rules unconsciously. Instead we rely on dispositions developed after an early stage of life and encoded as dense connections in our neural network. The neuroscience of neuro-plasticity provides the mechanism for Searle's background capacities.

Thus we have social norms without conscious or unconscious rule following. And thus society is not reducible to rules or rule-following individuals. Society is what emerges when a social species lives in social groups and establishes social norms. It is important, to me at least, that in explaining how society might work that we have not explained away or denied the existence of society. The arch Neoconservative, the late Lady Margaret Thatcher, once insisted that there was no such thing as society. Her elaborate state funeral was a most elegant refutation of this misunderstanding. Society is an ontologically subjective, but epistemically objective fact. It emerges when people live and work together, and not just people, but mammals and birds of many kinds also.

Lastly, the foundational principles on which mammal and bird social groups work—empathy and reciprocity—are the basis for the evolution of morality. This will be the subject of my next essay, but for now this concludes my survey of Searle's philosophy of social reality.

~ Bibliography ~

Covers all parts of this essay

Bono, Edward de (1990). I am Right - You are Wrong: From This to the New Renascence: From Rock Logic to Water Logic. Penguin.

Diamond, Jared. (2012) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Penguin.

Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Foucault, Michel. (1983) The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.) edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 208-226.  Original Publication: Le sujet et le pouvoir (Gallimard, D&E Vol.4 1982). Online: http://foucault.info/doc/documents/foucault-power-en-html

Goodall, Jane. (1971). In the Shadow of Man. London: Collins.

Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

Kolb, B., Gibb, R. & Robinson, T. (2003) Brain Plasticity and Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 12(1) 1-5.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press. Originally published as La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, 1979

MedicalXpress. (2016) Children overeagerly seek social rules. September 27, 2016 http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-children-overeagerly-social.html/ [Commenting on Schmidt M. F. H (2016)]

Medical Xpress. (2012) Toddlers object when people break the rules. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-toddlers-people.html July 26, 2012 [commenting on Schmidt 2012)

Schmidt, M. F. H. & Tomasello, M. (2012) Young Children Enforce Social Norms. Psychological Science. 21(4), 232-236. doi: 10.1177/0963721412448659

Schmidt, M. F. H. et al. (2016) Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds, Psychological Science (2016). DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661182

Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press.

Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social reality. Penguin.

Searle, John R. (2012). The Normative Structure of Human Civilization [lecture]. Max-Weber-Vortragsraum des Käte Hamburger Kollegs „Recht als Kultur". https://youtu.be/edn8R7ojXFg

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

Power: Social Reality (IV)

This is part IV of a V part essay. Click here for Part I. 

"The structure of institutional facts is the structure of power relations" (Searle 1995: 94)

I've been working through John Searle's philosophy of social reality. Searle is concerned with the question of how we get from physics to society, and his book The Construction of Social Reality focusses on the last step, from conscious organisms to society. I have been reviewing Searle and commenting on his ideas, comparing Searle with Lakoff and with ideas from primatology and anthropology. In the last essay got to the point where Searle points out that power pervades social realities. Power in this context is conventional, i.e. it arises from collective intentionality of social animals; and it is deontological, i.e. it is expressed as rights, duties, obligations etc, and in the way a social group monitors and enforces them. 

"Everything we value in civilisation requires the creation and maintenance of institutional power relations through collectively imposed status functions." (Searle 1995: 94)

Effectively, society is a set of deontological power relations expressed in status-functions, where a status-function is defined as an ontologically subjective function imposed on a person or object by collective intentionality, which grants them/it a status within the social hierarchy, and empowers or prohibits actions related to that function. Such functions require constant monitoring and adjustment to ensure that they do express our values. Equally, what we value will largely depend on the rights, duties, and obligations impressed on us from birth. Hence social groups are inherently socially conservative.

Whether there are universal human values or not is a vexed question that divides philosophers. See, for example, articles on Moral Relativism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and/or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Whether or not the values expressed in the deontic features of any social hierarchy are universal, we can say that there are common mechanisms for enacting values, by which I mean the imposition of status-functions and the fact that these are associated with rights, duties and obligations. I plan to return to the theme of universal values in a future essay on the evolution of morality (in development).

There are important differences in how societies handle conventional power related to the scale and technological sophistication. Amongst hunter gatherers, such as those studied by Jared Diamond in the highlands of New Guinea (2012), who live in societies with populations around Dunbar number of 150, there are no specialised roles with relation to moral governance. Everyone is in everyone else's business, hierarchy is fairly flat, and status is largely informal. By contrast in a large society like the UK, population 65 million, we have legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, divided into many areas of responsibility, as well as a civil service providing policy advice and administrative support; we have multiple security agencies, police forces as well as tax collectors, customs and excise agents, and immigration officers; and we have highly trained specialists in law and advocacy. The UK is not just a federation of four different countries, but contains a number of sub-societies with their own values (e.g. there are regional divisions within each of the federal states).

In each case, the underlying structure of the constitutive rules is the same, i.e. X counts as Y in C. A person counts as royal, an official, an officer of the law, or a citizen because collectively we agree that they do. We may require the display of status-indicators, such as special hats, uniforms, titles, or forms of address, but just as often the status is simply widely acknowledged. My status of "foreigner" is evident every time I open my mouth in England, though the fact is that all of my ancestors going back several centuries were English. I often find my ancestry is more English than locals because they have admixtures from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or even France and I do not. But when I was born, the land on which I was born, formerly claimed by the British Crown, was a separate nation state. So I am arbitrarily a foreigner. And treated as such. 

In the New Guinea highlands everyone one knows what everyone else is doing. Despite the dense rain forest, activities are mostly group oriented and privacy is rare. Under these circumstances, selfishness is extremely obvious, so most people are constrained by group norms to be prosocial most of the time. As mentioned previously norms are reasons for acting that are independent of our immediate inclinations. In the UK privacy is valued and widely experienced, but we also have almost ubiquitous CCTV surveillance of our public places, as well as routine government surveillance of all electronic communications (thanks to Edward Snowden for making this illegal practice public). Selfishness or clique-orientation is evident most of the time and in many modern ways of thinking about human beings, selfishness dominates (e.g. game theory, economics, behaviourist psychology).

In a small scale society people do not have identity crises because they are told who they are, and it is enacted in everyday life by their whole village. By contrast, there is considerable confusion and public debate as to what, if any, values are at the core of being British, especially when and identity is often rooted in smaller, regional, class, or ethnic units. For a large number of Brits the football team they support plays an important part of their identity. Being a "supporter" comes with its own rights, duties, and obligations. 

Societies don't just impose status-functions on members, they police and enforce them. Members of the group are raised from infancy to be good members of society, i.e. to follow behavioural norms and respect hierarchies, though this observation is complicated in large, divided societies, especially if one is a member of a minority community that is discriminated against. The important point here is that the individual is trained to hold themselves to account for the rights, duties, and obligations that society places on them. But the society, the state, also has duties and obligations in addition to rights. The role of the state and the acceptable methods it may use in pursuit of that role is a complex and hotly disputed topic, but broadly speaking we expect the state to work for the benefit and prosperity of its constituent citizens. And this is what all states say they are doing, whether they are in fact doing it or not.

Discussion of power, surveillance, and the state leads us to Michel Foucault and his investigations into the subject, into what it means to be a subject, and the processes of subjection.

~ The Subject ~

Of the three main philosophers I've referenced in this series of essays, i.e. John Searle, George Lakoff, and Michel Foucault, I know Foucault least well. This is partly because he is the least accessible by a considerable margin. Though he apparently spoke clearly in conversation, he wrote in the French obscurantist style, which was not improved by being translated into obscurantist English. So I hope any Foucault experts who happen to read my rather impressionistic take on the philosopher will indulge me. Perhaps I'm vague or even inaccurate about the details of Foucault's thought, but I hope that the intuition of a relation between Searlean and Foucauldian philosophy is at least valid. Foucault seems to me to have said important things, and to be perhaps the only 20th Century French philosopher who did. Searle grounds Foucault in a more realistic, pragmatic, and above all clear exposition of how society functions. Foucault never made so much sense to me as when I was reading The Construction of Social Reality.

In the section of my essay Spiritual III: Demenses of Power (20 Jun 2014) in which I explored some of Foucault's ideas, I wrote:

"The self we identify with is, in fact, mostly shaped by external forces... Virtually everything I feel myself to be is inherited or imposed on me rather than emerging out of my being."

This is consistent with the social philosophy outlined by Searle. In this view, "self" can be considered either as an aggregate of the status-functions imposed on the individual by society, or as emerging out of them. As Foucault observes, this happens with the willing participation of the individual. In Searle's terms "I" is the X term in the relation X counts as Y in C, and Y is the various roles we play in our lives; or in other words "I count as a son", "I count as a Buddhist", and so on, in all the innumerable relations I have to society, where society is the context in which I have these status-functions imposed by collective intentionality. In Foucault's (1983) words,

"This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects."

Again, from commentary in Demenses of Power

Almost all of these institutions aim to subject, to subjugate, me through shaping my subjectivity so that I subjugate myself. That is, for me to see myself as naturally subject to the limits, controls and definitions of society. For me to unthinkingly obey prohibitions and taboos. The constant threat is that failure to conform redefines the transgressor as other. And for the other the rules are different, less optimal, less conducive to well being, often harsh. To be other is to be sanctioned and excluded. 

We can see that even before reading Searle I was seeing social life through a deontological lens under the influence of Foucault (perhaps Searle was also influenced by Foucault?). Social norms take the form of authorisations and prohibitions, but they are ultimately a product of collective intentionality. What Searle does is show why this is so and how it works in more detail. I stand in a relation to society where my (hierarchical) status and function within society is defined by the collective intentionality of society. By collective agreement, I count as various categories of member of various groups. There are kin status-functions: sibling, parent, extended family, etc.; age related status-functions: infant, child, teenager, adult, elder; occupational status-functions: student, manufacturer, CEO, manager, etc; class status-functions: proletarian and bourgeoisie, or  worker, capitalist, and land-owner; marital status-functions: single, married, divorced. And so on. There are racial, national, ethnic, religious, governmental, and ecclesiastical status-functions. Sex, gender, and sexual orientation are all governed by status functions.

*As already pointed out, these ontologically subjective status-functions are structured in the same way in which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003) have showed that metaphors are structured. A suitable source domain is mapped onto a target domain so that the target can be discussed as if it is the source. This is to say that target counts as source for the purposes of abstraction (this is to the best of my knowledge an observation not made before). Such metaphors are what enable and structure abstract thought. Arguably social relations are abstractions from social interactions, and this means we only understand them using metaphors. Thus the imposed status-function seems to be metaphorical in structure. Again, status-functions are ontologically subjective and thus we cannot reference objective reality to ground them as truth. Social status is true, to the extent that truth is relevant here, only because it is agreed to be true. Society is an ontologically subjective phenomenon.

* A reader has pointed out a conceptual problem with this paragraph that I have yet to resolve and need to think about. Take it with a grain of salt in the meantime.  J. 25.11.2016

Some of statuses are accompanied by formal status indicators like special hats, wedding rings, passports, or uniforms; some more informally by clothing or hair cut (compare how we identify a hippy, a football supporter, a punk-rocker, or a Buddhist monk). Some statuses are indicated by our accent, pronunciation, or word choices. In the absence of status indicators, we take our social cues from behaviour, mannerisms, etc. If people think of me as a writer, then for the purposes of society I am a writer and can be discussed with respect to that category. But if I am a writer then society expects me to behave in the manner which they consider a writer should behave. Even new acquaintances subtly coerce me into adopting a stance appropriate to the status they are granting me. I am a writer, then where is my writing published (in academic journals and in self-published books). Why is my spelling so bad (which is easy I have mild dyslexia). Searle has a lot more to say about status-indicators, but I'm going to gloss over them for the sake of brevity.

Each of us is deeply embedded in a network of status-functions, all of which require collective-intentionality, that collective includes the individual qua subject. We expect people to be subjects to the collective will and we take either evasive or hostile action against non-formists - freeze, flight, or fight are our basic stances with respect to any threat, and non-conformity is often a threat. Collective intentionality, then, imposes status functions on us; it shapes us as a subject. By the time we reach an age at which we might think of defining ourselves, we are already completely defined. The idea that we can define ourselves is also something inculcated into us by our society. A typical result is the group of rebellious teenagers who signal their rebellion by wearing identical, branded, clothing. Rebellion is really only conforming to some other norm. Often the only way to really redefine ourselves is to severe links with our community of origin and move away. Even so we take our self-beliefs with us and when we arrive we meet a wall of expectations from any new community we might join. And without community we die slowly or go mad, or both.

As a member of a group, I cannot simply take on any role. I must get people to agree to accept me in that role, often by undergoing a defined process of education, preparation, and testing. On the other hand one can become the class clown or the village idiot, merely through persistent repeated behaviour that is consistent with that role. A wily South African project manager once told me that if a team he was managing was under performing he would call a meeting and deliberately start an argument with one of them and then escalate it until things got quite heated. In the aftermath the team would typically start working together much better: nowadays I would say that this is because conflict engages our emotions. In the aftermath of the conflict, hierarchies and social roles like leader, peace-maker, etc are established. In other words the after the shake up the groups becomes a normal human social group with defined roles. We know were we stand and can work well together. The slogan at the time for the phases of group formation was "forming, storming, norming, and performing". I'll have a lot more to say on this subject in coming essays. But most of this social jockeying takes place below the waterline of consciousness. We cannot help ourselves because at heart we are social primates.

Most roles that we serve in are ones that are chosen for us, before we ever think about what role we might want to play. The choices we do make are made within a context that is internalised very early on and reinforced every waking minute of our lives. And the point is not to say this is good or bad. This is simply the way primate groups work. There is some influence on temperament from genetic inheritance, the quality of parenting we receive, and our early education. Experience does contribute. But who we are is as much to do with how other people see us, as with how we see ourselves. This is why it can be hard to get society to changes its views about people. Type casting is not only a problem for actors. But it also means that most psychotherapeutic models are completely wrong. 

~ Conclusion ~

What follows is a conclusion and summary, but is not the last word on the subject. There's an obvious flaw in the theory as presented that Searle tackles towards the end of his book and which I will outline in the next essay. Still, now is the time to pull everything together and see what conclusions we can draw so far. Searle concludes his 2012 lecture on social reality with a hierarchical list. What follows is my adaptation of that list. What we have here is a powerful explanation of how social groups exist based on just three concepts: observer relative functions, collective intentionality, and deontic powers:

• Consciousness is a high level, neurobiological state, wholly caused by neurons, but none-the-less irreducibly subjective. 
• Conscious states enable human beings to imagine functions for objects or people that are not intrinsic to them, and to impose those functions on them.
• All such functions are observer relative, ontologically subjective, epistemically objective and can become institutional facts.
• All institutional facts are, via collective intentionality, status-functions.
• All status-functions are created and maintained by applications of status-function declarations (i.e. by language or something which approximates it).
• Some status function declarations require status-indicators.
• All status-function declarations create deontic powers.
• All deontic powers give people reasons for acting that are independent of their immediate inclinations.
• Deontic powers hold societies together.

Human societies only exist because of status-functions. We reach the level of complexity we do because our status-functions are represented linguistically. Non-human animals also have societies, but they are very much simpler in structure and functions. They are more like proto-societies because the roles and hierarchies have to be communicated through physical interactions, though arguably these still have a propositional, language-like, structure.

In science the vocabulary is created by observing reality. Social reality, by contrast, is created by the vocabulary. As Searle says, language is constitutive of human society. And here we see why a constructivist approach to development and ethics, a la Kegan and Chapman. All social norms, including moral rules, are constructed, collectively by the society in which they function. Rules find their value in being declared by someone higher up the hierarchy and agreed to by everyone. being a member of any group means subjecting oneself to the norms of the group. If those norms are not established, then the group will fail. All social institutions like moral rules are constructed within the context of social reality, which means that they are observer relative, ontologically subjective,  and epistemically objective. There is no recourse to reality to justify moral rules, which is why some people say that science cannot tell us how to live. Social reality is itself a construct, it also  observer relative, ontologically subjective, and epistemically objective. On the other hand I will argue in a forthcoming essay that evolution highlights the basic capacities that animals have evolved to enable social living and that these form the basis for the ethical principles that inform moral rules. Science can tell us how we do live, help us to make that conscious, and help us to see what is consistent or inconsistent with our being a social primate; where consistency approximates well-being and inconsistency approximates ill-being. 

Searle's outline of how social reality comes about relates to Foucault's study of the subject. Our sense of self and all our social relations are status-functions imposed by collective intentionality. The sequence here is important. We tend to think the sequence, beginning with the brain, goes like this

brain - conscious states - subjectivity - social reality

But in fact it goes more like this:

brain - conscious states - social reality - subjectivity

In other words social reality precedes and shapes subjectivity. Under the influence of Romanticism, Victorian philosophy, and psycho-analysis we've had this the wrong way around for almost 200 years. The emphasis on individuals over society is counter-productive at best and catastrophic at worst. Individuals only exist in a social reality. Outsiders tend not to prosper. On the other hand a degree of eccentricity can be beneficial in societies. Nowadays I would balance this with the need for a science of Amistics - the study of the impact of technology on society. 

So presuming that we can get from physics to consciousness states, we can get from consciousness states to social reality and out of social reality comes subjectivity. As a philosophical framework this seems clear enough. However, in terms of the science, we still don't have a clear route from physics to conscious states. We can get from fundamental physics to brains, but while it's beyond reasonable doubt that the brain is responsible for conscious states, we don't know exactly how this works. And many of the best researchers are chasing down dead-end leads. I've become very wary of the abstraction "consciousness". Abstractions are governed by metaphor, so in discussing consciousness we can only ever do so as if it were something more fundamental. Conscious states, though subjective, are less problematic.

In the last essay in this series I will look at the proposition, implied so far, that human behaviour is a matter of rule following. The short answer is that it is not, though rules are clearly discernible and we are quite capable of following rules when we need to. This requires the introduction of the fourth major concept in Searle's philosophy of social reality after functions, collective intentionality, and deontic power, which is the background.

~~oOo~~

~ Bibliography ~

Covers all parts of this essay

Diamond, Jared. (2012) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Penguin.

Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Foucault, Michel. (1983) The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.) edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 208-226.  Original Publication: Le sujet et le pouvoir (Gallimard, D&E Vol.4 1982). Online: http://foucault.info/doc/documents/foucault-power-en-html

Fox, Kate. (2005) Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Hodder & Stoughton.

Goodall, Jane. (1971). In the Shadow of Man. London: Collins.

Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

Kolb, B., Gibb, R. & Robinson, T. (2003) Brain Plasticity and Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 12(1) 1-5.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press. Originally published as La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, 1979

MedicalXpress. (2016) Children overeagerly seek social rules. September 27, 2016 http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-children-overeagerly-social.html/ [Commenting on Schmidt M. F. H (2016)]

Medical Xpress. (2012) Toddlers object when people break the rules. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-toddlers-people.html July 26, 2012 [commenting on Schmidt 2012)

Schmidt, M. F. H. & Tomasello, M. (2012) Young Children Enforce Social Norms. Psychological Science. 21(4), 232-236. doi: 10.1177/0963721412448659

Schmidt, M. F. H. et al. (2016) Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds, Psychological Science (2016). DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661182

Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press.

Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social reality. Penguin.

Searle, John R. (2012). The Normative Structure of Human Civilization [lecture]. Max-Weber-Vortragsraum des Käte Hamburger Kollegs „Recht als Kultur". https://youtu.be/edn8R7ojXFg

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.