Pragmatic Reductionism: On the Relation between Contingency and Metacontingency

Abstract

One of the main arguments in favor of the metacontingency as a model for explaining social phenomena is that it embraces another kind of selection (cultural selection) beyond natural and operant selection. Despite being emergent on operant processes, it would not be reducible to operant selection. Consequently, cultural selection would demand a conceptual framework of its own, hence the metacontingency. Assuming the existence of another kind of selection is an ontological premise, and that this new process requires its own conceptual framework, because contingency analysis is insufficient to explain it, can be considered an epistemological premise. Our goal in this paper is to argue that the epistemological premise present in the metacontingency literature is wrong. To do so, we present pragmatic reductionism as a model to discuss the possibility of reductive explanations of selection and maintenance of cultural practices from metacontingency to contingency analysis. Based on this framework, we provide examples of pragmatic reductive interpretations, thought experiments, and an analysis of experimental data in which we try to explain away the metacontingency. We conclude that it is possible to pragmatically reduce metacontingency explanations to contingency explanations. That does not, however, invalidate the ontological premise about the existence of different processes related to cultural evolution and selection whatever those might be. It only shows that, if they exist at all, they are not the ones being studied in metacontingency research.