Monocausality bias, essentialism, modernist grand narratives, and the awesomeness of statistical uncertainty
#This is a "shower thought" more than a properly empirically researched idea, so it is presented without any citations. This lack of resources is also a reference to many modernist philosophers,...
#This is a "shower thought" more than a properly empirically researched idea, so it is presented without any citations. This lack of resources is also a reference to many modernist philosophers, whom I dearly appreciate.
Modernist theories famously tried to get at "the truth behind eveything". For example, majority of both pro- and anti-capitalists thought that history was progressing in a linear tract, and that there was such a thing as end of history. So, they tried to find the drive of history. Famously, Marx claimed to have found it in historical materialism. Similarly, many pro-capitalists have declared The End of History when USSR fell.
Both of these claims were made on the idea that a single mechanism was behind the progress of history, therefore almost everything.
It is my thesis that this was and is an extension of essentialist thinking. Such a way of thinking looked for "the essence" of the object of study, because it assumed an (singular) essence drove the object to behave the way it did. There were no multiple causes, only a single cause—if you could find it, you could explain the object in its entirety.
Modernist philosophers updated this idea a bit. They didn't look for a Platonic idea, for example, but they looked for "the drive behind the object". While they were more materialist, it was also a quasi-metaphysical endeavor.
I'm going to quote Marx's historical materialism again, because it's one modernist narrative I'm familiar with—simply put, it was such an attempt. While the historical materialist narrative touched on many great things about humanity (e.g. the plasticity of "human nature", the dependence of culture on material conditions), it overreached and overreduced history to a single mechanism. It seemingly recognized the role of other mechanisms, but decidedly explained away their importance in contrast to what Marx saw as "productive forces".
This was an extension of Hegelian dialectics, but reversed. Hegel assumed thought drove materialist changes. Marx flipped this over. However, both of these were still highly metaphysical, highly essentialist.
Essentialism's mistake, in this context, is not only that it is metaphysical, it's also that it reduces the object of study to a monocausal explanation. It looks for only one cause. However, as the advance of scientific and most specifically statistical knowledge shows, there are always multiple causes to complex phenomena.
This revolution in thinking was a great attack on modernist and all the preceding grand narratives. Statistics especially was important in this. The more an explanation -any explanation- was tested in scientific contexts the more it was apparent that no single cause was able to explain everything. Nevermind that, as both natural and social scientists became aware, most of the time a single cause wasn't able to explain most (>50%) of the variation seen in a study.
Another result of statistical thinking, if one is willing to consider all its implications, is that uncertainty is an inherent part of everything we do and explain. There is no epistemic certainty, nothing we can know for certain. So, everything is always, at some level, a working hypothesis. This doesn't mean that everything is equally plausible, but that we can never be 100% certain about our explanations, neither in science nor in anything.
Why is this so? Because inferential statistics is structured to give an idea about the uncertainty of the inference we are doing, based on our observations. In short, it always assumes there are "error bars" or something of equivalent function.
This is the second implication of this revolution—we should be aware of uncertainty and embrace it.
In summary, there were two important results of this revolution in thinking.
- Monocausality bias hinders thinking. In complex phenomena, natural or social, there are most likely multiple important drives (causes).
- Rejecting the inherent epistemic uncertainty of our explanations and embracing the psychological certainty of monocausal explanations would be a folly.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, this doesn't mean everything is equally plausible (doing so is also counter to statistical thinking!). But realizing the value in this approach provides a great deal of flexibility of the mind, and it makes it much less likely that a person would seek comfort in psychologically certain, essentialist or quasi-essentialist narratives. It makes it less likely so that you fall victim to overly reductive but confident-sounding explanations.
It also allows one to critically examine modernist and previous explanations, both in positive and negative ways. Grand narratives, I think, touch on many great topics and have insight, but they fall victim to overreductive monocausality bias. If you can separate them from that, then you find a source of rich thinking styles. It seems that sociology does this with thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and more.
This, I think, is one of the greater revolutions in the "post-modern" era. Post-modern thinking is often associated with extreme skepticism, to the point of declaring everything unknowable, however, this would be reductive. In the way I described, being skeptical of such grand explanations and embracing multicausality and uncertainty is an extremely productive approach.
This, however, does not mean essentialist, monocausal, modernist, etc. thinking is defeated and gone. "Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard."
Of course, despite the quote, there is nothing sure about the eventual victory of this better way of thinking. However, even in the case that it could become the dominant mode of thought, it will take a great deal of time and active struggle against the old ideas and powers-that-be.