From Causality to Catalysis in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Our knowledge is trapped in the discourse about causality. This trap is set by the common language notions of something causing something else and its penetration into scientific domains. The crucial feature of the phenomena in the social sciences is the flexibility for intentional coordination of conditions of personal and collective cultures with social representations which is a feature absent at the lower levels of catalysis. This is made possible for the use of sign systems at various levels—personal, communal, societal, economic, and political. We can look at human phenomena as semiotically catalyzed. Social sciences introduce a new demand for philosophy of science—to account for the agency of purposeful actors and their co(unter)-actions in any generalized scheme of catalytic processes. This demand is an opportunity that may lead all social sciences toward understanding the dramatic realities of the human condition.

Our knowledge is trapped in the discourse about causality. This trap is set by the common language notions of something causing something else and its penetration into scientific domains. When a medieval examining board asks a young aspirer toward becoming a medical doctor “why does opium put one to sleep?” and nods at the scientific response “because it has virtus dormitiva” in it, common sense has helped to create a believable (and for practice, sufficient) causal explanation for it. In a similar vein, I can explain my shyness in social gatherings by my personality trait of “introversion” that—I assume—is located somewhere in my “self-system” and causes my discomfort for being in public. Psychology as well as other social sciences is rich in such causal attributions, yet most of these are discursive tricks that cover up the need for further analysis of how particular outcomes happen.

When philosophy of science enters the arena of the social sciences, the discourse about causality needs to give way to that of catalysis (Cabell & Valsiner, 2014). Why so? As Malnes (2019—Chap. 7 in this volume) demonstrates, thinking in terms of causality has been a complex issue already in the pre-social sciences where the difficult issues of the framing of the research efforts by socially normative conventions are not yet considerable. In the social sciences, they are (Strand, 2019—Chap. 3 in this volume). Furthermore, both social scientists and the phenomena they study are made possible by the power of human agency that has led the emergence of all social, economic, political, and psychological phenomena in human lives.

Social Sciences: Normative Regulation of Human Agency

In contrast to pre-social sciences, in the social sciences, intentionality and temporality are of high importance. In addition, the focus on open-systemic nature of all phenomena from biological to psychological, sociological, and political ones is of central relevance. While Niels Bohr in the beginning of the twentieth century did not need to consider the possibility that electrons “jump” from one orbit to another based on their “inherent intention” to do so, the explanation of parachuters jumping off from an airplane cannot be considered a random act but is explainable by their goal orientations, intentions for why they jump, and what they are expected to do after they land. Human psychological, social, economic, and political worlds are built on inherent intentionality and goal-directed moving toward the future—while being regulated by the social normativity of such moves (Brinkmann, 2019—Chap. 11 in this volume). Normativity sets the stage on which the intentional actions of personal and social (institutional) actors operate, and direct causal linkages vanish into the background. In a colorful example, Svend Brinkmann reminds us of this contrast:

Noticing an elderly lady with damaged grocery bags provides (under normal circumstances) a reason for others to help. The relationship between the situation and preferred action (to intervene and help) is wholly unlike causal relationship between say, the weight of the goods in her bag and the ensuing accident when the goods fall on the ground. The latter should rightly be seen within a space of causation. The goods have no reason to destroy the bags and fall on the ground. They simply do this because of blind causal powers involving gravity. (Brinkmann, 2016, p. 4)

Normativity is central for organizing our knowledge construction in basic ways—as the contrast between causal and catalytic models demonstrates (Toomela, 2014; Valsiner, 2014—see also Figs. 8.9 and 8.10). The contrast is fundamental for any science—it coincides with the distinction between elementaristic (associationist) and wholistic (systemic) axiomatic bases of the different sciences. It is not by coincidence that chemistry and biology have advanced rapidly once the catalytic focus in ways of constructing theories overtook the leading role from the causal discourses in the nineteenth- to twentieth-century advancement of sciences. Such transition has not yet occurred in the social sciences where the habit of search for new knowledge in terms of looking for causal relations between isolated features of the complex system (“variables”) still prevails. The result is a cacophony of a myriad of claims of one-to-one relations between elements in a complex system. This approach is myopic—the systemic nature, the whole, gets lost in amidst of the elements. It is time for social sciences to say farewell to the “variables”-focused mindset (Valsiner & Brinkmann, 2016) and find new—systemic—ways of arriving at knowledge. It is here that the catalytic approach becomes central for our epistemology in the social sciences. However, here we face recursive normativity that complicates the epistemology of the social sciences. Not only are the phenomena studied by the social sciences normatively organized, but that normative organization of the phenomena feeds into the normativity of the mindsets the researchers use in their studies of these phenomena. Such recursive normativity may hinder the boldness of various hypotheses that social scientists dare to set forth for their investigations. Both the social scientists and their public—research participants and evaluators of the value of the research—are based on the same canons of normativity. It is therefore not surprising that some of the social sciences—psychology in particular—have been demonstrated to be hindered by pseudo-empiricism¹ (Smedslund, 1995) in their research practices.

What Is Accomplished by Thinking in Catalytic Terms?

The catalytic approach—started in chemistry in the nineteenth century and overtaking biological sciences in the twentieth—deviates from the classical causal models by focusing on recurrent reproduction of the system that produces outcomes (“causal effects” in terms of traditional causality discourses) and giving these outcomes the status of by-products of the processes of such reproduction (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

General scheme of catalysis

Figure 8.1 describes the catalytic process in its generic being. A cycle in the regeneration of the catalysts (CAT) includes three phases—BINDING, SYNTHESIS, and RELEASE AND RECREATION. No discourse of causality is present here—the outcome (released synthesized A + B) is a by-product of the catalytic cycle. Two “inputs”—A and B—are binding themselves to the CAT which results in their linking into a new whole (A with B) that is then released from the binding to the CAT. The synthesis emerges as a work of an integrated system—where different parts are integrated into functional wholes.

This form of organization of emergence of new wholes has the advantage over the traditional causality talk. It specifies the self-preserving catalysis system that makes it possible for particular outcomes to emerge (or not). It allows for emergence of synthetic forms that give new structure to the outcome. The compound (A with B) is a new form that has Gestalt characteristics beyond its immediate consisting elements (the synthesized unity of A and B). The analysis of the catalytic processes allows for precise depiction of how the new Gestalt emerges. Traditional causality discourse does not afford it—to claim that “the substance CAT caused A to become linked with B” would overlook the crucial details of the process of A and B coming together. To make a causal claim here would—in analogy—amount to claiming that the priest who marries a young couple in a church ceremony “causes” them to get married. The priest—and the religious institution it represents—may have a crucial role to play in the organization of the matrimony and family relations, but it is not a causal role. The priest is a catalyst that makes the entrance into a (religious) marriage possible.

Catalytic Models: Overcoming the Limits of CausalityDiscourses

The need for implementing the scheme of catalysis in the social sciences—replacing the traditional causality talk—is clear. The efforts to reduce complexity of the systemic phenomena by attributing causality for these to high numbers of “independent variables” have had its debilitating impacts upon the clarity of theoretical thought (Valsiner & Brinkmann, 2016).

First, the discourse of variables has guided all the empirical activities toward “discovery” of simple causal connections A → B (varying the “independent variable” A causes change in B, the “dependent variable”) overlooking the systemic organization of the phenomena. This problem has been recognized in traditional causal discourse (by introducing the notion of “intervening variables”) but cannot be resolved within the causal discourse framework where agency (and its counterpart—resistance) is not considered.

Second, the “variables discourse” artificially elevates the researcher into the role of power in working with the phenomena. The researcher is assumed to perform the act of “random sampling” (Valsiner & Sato, 2006) despite the reality that any sampling of human beings depends upon their agreement to be “sampled.” The “sampled” persons are at most invited (rather than “taken from population”) and can counteract the “sampling” by refusing or avoiding participation in research. The possibility of counteraction to “being sampled” leads to new industry of “paying collaboration” where different financial and symbolic incentives are brought to play to guarantee the insatiable need of social scientists for assembling a “large sample.”

Furthermore, there is the “illusion of power”: the researcher is assumed to have full control over the manipulation of the “independent variables”—which in reality of interaction of the goals-oriented researcher with resisting band divergently oriented “research participants” is a comforting illusion. Adaptation to this limitation is taken to the symbolic level where fixed indexes (gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) become treated as if these could be varied at the will of the researchers—statistically, but not in reality. Instead of the glory of control assumed by the researcher, we might be in a more adequate realm if we view the researcher as a beggar—for the data.

Treating the complexity of social phenomena as if it is a matrix of causal “effects” of all kinds of causes and their formal “interactions” (Gigerenzer, 1991) replaces the search for actual organizational principles by attributing causality to an artificially constructed matrix. The social sciences are dealing with phenomena for which the axiom of nonlinearity is appropriate—all biological, psychological, social, economic, and political phenomena are inherently nonlinear in their organization (Puche Navarro, 2009). This axiom is built on the observation of the contrast between natural and technological (human-made) objects. The human mind is a system on the border of the two object worlds—its biological substrate (brain) functions as any biological system would (nonlinearly), but the “molding of the mind” by human political and educational systems superimposes a linear order. The latter is the administrative principle of control by homogenized social norms through insisting on the rigor of the classical logic. The human mind of course escapes that administrative control by ways of cognitive heuristics.

The Dynamics of Linearity and Nonlinearity

What does nonlinearity mean? In its simplest explication, it is a curved line. In Riemann-Lobachevsky geometry, all straight lines are actually curved.² Nature produces no straight lines, while human technologies are mostly based on organizing their products in linear orders—straight lines, fixed corners, etc. Likewise the methodologies of the social sciences are built upon the notion of linearity—turning complex nonlinear phenomena into artificially “measured” entities (Michell, 1999). By forcing the nonlinear into a process of linearized “measurement” operations creates an irreversible loss of the relevant features of the phenomena.

We assume that the relation between “ugly” and “beautiful” is that of polar mutually exclusive opposites that—if put on a linear scale—can even be turned into quantified indexes (Fig. 8.2b—an equivalent of a rating scale). Yet such quantification of a linear scale is an epistemological impasse (Wagoner & Valsiner, 2005) as it inadequately represents the nonlinearity of the phenomena (e.g., Fig. 8.2a) that it is supposed to “measure.” Most objects we seemingly easily rate on a linear fixed scale (like Fig. 8.2b) are complex multifaceted wholes, the Gestalt qualities that vanish in the act of superimposition of the subjective linear order (rating scale). In the example in Fig. 8.2, this vanishing act is exemplified by the inherent ambivalence in the scene—the Biblical personage of Judith after killing Holofernes by cutting off his head, now, is depicted carrying it into the public domain of the viewers of the painting. Her just finished act is deeply ambiguous—she is a murderer, a schemer who purposefully went to the enemy general Holofernes seducing him so as to kill him. At the same time, she is a hero—a woman whose assassination act saves her people from being slaughtered by the troops of Holofernes. The depiction of Judith by the artist does not fail to display her bodily beauty together with the holding of her trophy—Holofernes’ head—in her hands.

Fig. 8.2

Linear order superimposed on complex processes and its curvilinearization. (a) An object of evaluation (Giorlamo da Capri, 1540–50 Judith with the head of Holofernes. Vienna, Kunsthistorische Museum), (b) Regular assumption of a linear binary opposite in evaluation (a or b), (c) Curvilinearization of the opposition (from a or b to bringing a and b to linking with each other) and emergenceof the relation of tension

The realistic process involved in the relating with the object of evaluation differs from the superimposition of the linear order onto the nonlinear phenomenon (as depicted in Fig. 8.2a). It is the adjustment of the psychological system to the nonlinear nature of the object—curvilinearization of the perceiving and appreciating mind—that leads to the self to create its own experience through the catalytic conditions of the object that is the “target” of evaluation. The flexibility of my psyche is being modulated by myself under the conditions of the scene I am experiencing. The psychological tension (Fig. 8.2c) that curvilinearization of the psyche brings with it is temporary—it either escalates to a breaking point (and arrives at dialectical synthesis—Valsiner, 2015; Vygotsky, 1971) or de-escalates to a non-tensional state of quasi-linearity.

I posit that this tension is crucial. The dynamics of linearization <> curvilinearization of the structure of the human psyche can be seen as the basic principle of human mind. We become trapped into the insoluble web that unites “love” and “hate” at times (curvilinearized state) in some relation (toward a displeasing political figure or abusive parent) while being completely linear in the relation to subjectively trivial details of daily life (linearization).

An alternative possibility is to see mutually linked opposites as two sides of a Möbius loop—permanently turning into one another (Fig. 8.3). Here the two are permanently together—each + vector is immediately opposed by its counter-vector (−) while their positions on the loop itself fluctuate between front and back positions at every turn of the loop. “Love” turns into “hate” in temporal dominance only to be followed by a next reversal of the dominance relations. This depicts the eternal maintenance of a fixed ambivalence relationship without any possibility of breakdown or breakthrough (synthesis). The tension continues in the eternal cyclicity of reversals of the dominance of opposites.

Fig. 8.3

Unity of opposites in perpetual dynamics of regular place change (Möbius strip with forces added)

The Basic Tension: Between Linearity and Spirality

I posit (Valsiner, 2019) a very general abstract tension between two orders of any form—linear and spiral (helical). Triskeleon (Fig. 8.4a) is the maximum case of curvilinearity. It is a graphic abstraction of the closing of two-dimensional space and opening of the third dimension at the eyes of the spirals (in contrast with the right side, Fig. 8.4b) where the linear abstraction from the center point can expand in two dimensions in all three linear directions, but there is no opening to the third.

Fig. 8.4

Tension between curvilinear and linear abstract forms

This tension is triggered by the settings we are in—the conditions for our activities. We introduce linearity into our human-made natural environments by architectural straight lines—which vanish as the building becomes a ruin and the natural growth takes over. We reproduce curvilinearity in ornamenting spaces of symbolic kinds—such as ceilings of tombs of burial chambers (Fig. 8.5).

Fig. 8.5

Ceiling decoration in an Egyptian tomb (Goodyear, 1891, p. 90 plate 91)

The tensions of social living—unity of openness and closedness—are encoded into the forms of environmental decorations during our lives, at the entrance into the “other” world, and in our imagination of the latter.

Ornamentation of any kind is human encoding of meanings into the periphery of our action fields. But what is the “action field” for a dead Egyptian pharaoh whose ceiling of the tomb in which the casket with his embalmed dead body is located under many wrappings? It encodes a generalized and abstracted catalytic orientation for entrance into afterlife.

Ornaments are of catalytic value for our meaning construction acting within our environments (Valsiner, 2019). We create them as decorations (of something—our clothing, our life environments), but while being that, they become catalysts that are present in our agentive actions and provide their meaningful context.

Basic Tensions in Forms and Philosophy of Science

There is something missing in this general picture. Both assumptions—that of a binary opposition (that becomes curvilinear leading to tension between united opposites) and of a Möbius loop—are equally insufficient as they either avoid or fixate time. Even if it is possible to argue that the Möbius loop solution does include time—needed to see the reversal of the back <> front vectors at each turn—the process of the dominance change is turned into a cyclical repetitive loop. Nothing can grow out of the tensions on the surface of the loop despite the tension of the opposites that change their front-back position at every turn.

Philosophy of science is a cruel arbiter for empirical investigations in any science. When the first assumed axiom of a science is wrong, the whole enterprise of a science built on it cannot be adequate—this is the cruelty of empirical efforts in areas where the first axiom was built inadequately. It took chemistry three centuries to escape from the common sense—yet inadequate—assumptions of alchemy. In a similar vein, the social sciences struggle to move beyond reduction of nonlinear complexity into linearized “variables.” Linear “variables” cannot generate new of their own kind—but in open systems of biological, psychological, and social orders, the generation of new forms is the starting datum of the systems.

Both models of curvilinear kind (Figs. 8.2 and 8.3) axiomatically rule out the view of phenomena in developmental turns. The latter requires the inclusion of irreversible time. In contrast to their physics counterpart, the social sciences deal with time-inclusive phenomena. If we look at nonlinear opposites in terms of their transformations into novel forms, it is the catalytic organization of self-maintenance and self-transformation that is to be explicated.

How Catalytic Systems Grow?

The primary need for any catalytic account of phenomena is to guarantee their recreation so that they can function in the maintenance of the system (Fig. 8.1). Yet open systems—to which all phenomena of the social sciences belong—do undergo developmental transitions in both directions, increasing their own complexity and annihilating it, at some times.

Innovation of catalytic systems involves catalytic conditions setting itself (Fig. 8.4). Here the fate of the catalytic cycle P-Q-S-? has three potential trajectories at each round, X, Y, and Z.

Figure 8.6 indicates how some by-product of the system takes on a self-catalyzer role (autocatalysis) to enable the system to either eradicate itself (X = “system’s suicide”), maintain itself (Y), or innovate its own structure (Z). It is the trajectory Z that is specific for the catalytic processes of the social sciences. Not only maintenance (Y) but the possibility to diverge into trajectory Z allows for living systems to be and to become new. The divergence border of Y and Z is the arena for innovation. The specific combination of autocatalyst (A) and allocatalyst (B) at such junction can lead to a new configuration of the catalytic system -P-Q-S-(?)-.

Fig. 8.6

Auto- and allocatalysis in life courses of catalytic systems

Phenomena of conversion—to new religious or political orders—give us many examples of such reorganization of the catalytic systems. The major transformation of such kind in European history was the Protestant Reformation. The emergence of self-regulatory internalized religious sentiments (new part depicted by?) led to changed normative practices in daily lives.

Beyond Causal Attributions—To Structures of the Full Field

In our social sciences many causal attributions are made that cannot lead to new Wissenschaft, but which nevertheless become consensually accepted. Thus we hear about “financial crisis” as if “causing” some economic outcome, or “gender” causing differences between men and women. In psychology we hear that “culture” causes human beings to act in one or another way (e.g., “my culture causes me to demand that coffee be served in delicate porcelain cup”). In reality the notion culture cannot “cause” anything—it is my personal decision to refuse the cup of coffee offered to me in a plastic cup. I may say “my culture requires that…,” but it is I, not the “culture,” who makes that statement. Unni Wikan has made the possibilities of culture clear:

Culture has no agency—only humans and other sentient beings have the power to act…Neither has culture any power—beyond what people attribute to it. (Wikan, 2002, p. 10)

Similarly, attributes like gender, religion, socioeconomic status, and other general idea complexes like that cannot cause anything in society. They are complex catalytic resources that—when utilized by active persons—can unite (or disunite) ideas, persons, and justice systems. They are made functional in the actual conduct by aligning the current action (“I am now doing X”) with the wide sign field of catalytic kind (“I can do X, I am a woman and this fits my gender” versus “I can do X, I am a man and this does not fit my gender, but I want to change gender roles”). In the case of human beings in any society, the notion of causality may be constrained by intentionality—the move from I WANT → to I WILL → I DO would constitute the human condition of causal action, and the main role for this subjective causal chain is the assemblage of catalytic conditions that make the movement toward set goals possible and meaningful. This narrowed down notion of causality for human actions fits the specific condition of Homo sapiens—construction of new environments and their meaningfulness.

This construction of self-sought environments starts from basic features of personal appreciation of relations with environments—making the distinctions between states if silence in contrast to non-silence (Lehmann, 2016). The field of non-silence becomes differentiated into noise (meaningless sounds) and meaningful forms—of speech and music (Klempe, 2016). The latter operates as a catalyst in the scheme of goals-oriented action of a person.

Consider the example of Kurdish 33-year-old refugee from Turkey to Greece. Saber described his relation to the role of Kurdish music in his life (Kurdish music is very strong because it succeeds in reflecting the everyday life of Kurdish people directly and you experience this immediately), going on to describe its catalytic role in his personal life:

…when I work at home or read, I put on quality Kurdish music or classical. But I am a melancholic person, meaning that we come from a certain entity and we have certain roots that we cannot forget. And when I have problems, I try not to avoid them, on the contrary I try to face them, I will put on some melancholic music (pause) I like that and it keeps me alive with the past and the fight [for Kurdish political goals]. (Kadianaki & Zittoun, 2014, p. 198)

In this example we can observe the attributional construction of believed-in causality: Saber sets up the ambience of listening to music as a catalytic condition for the ongoing daily activities, but then presents the music as if it has causal properties in relation to him (“it keeps me alive”). The music of course does not keep him alive (neither in the literal or metaphoric sense of the word) other than in his belief. This belief in causality reflects the actual role of the music as a catalyst. A similar situation has been described in psychotherapy processes (Valsiner, 1999).

Here we can generalize—the common language attribution by goals-oriented human beings of the form “A causes B” is a projected cognitive illusion that masks the actual role of a catalyst (“A sets up conditions for MY(our) achieving B”). The best example is the discourse about “effects” of formal education on human cognitive development. It is habitually presented in causal terms (e.g., “schoolingcauses pupils’ transition to use of deductive logic”). In reality “schooling” is a setting—a totality of socially organized education environment—that as a catalytic megastructure enables the agentive pupils to master new ways of cognitive functioning. This illusion makes it possible to defocus attention from the agentive role of the person that can play a role for ego-defense functions.

Human beings enter different social institutional settings—religious, educational, political, etc. They join such settings through negotiation of goals of the institutions and their own. Different institutions preemptively set up catalytic conditions to support such “joining in society.” Presentations of national history in any society set up conditions for persons to work toward their feelings as citizens of a “nation sate,” romanticizing the value of belonging (Lopez et al., 2016, p. 218). Numerous institutionally mandated depictions of hazards of smoking on cigarette packages are to create polarized conditions—supporting the act of nonsmoking (by nonsmokers) and in parallel supporting the act of smoking (for smokers). In both cases the person’s initial state of affairs (“smoker” or “nonsmoker”) and goal orientations (staying as is versus changing to the other trajectory) are catalyzed by the same ambience. Warnings on cigarette packages do not “cause” smokers to quit smoking (or nonsmokers to start smoking) but set the conditions for the future action of continuity or discontinuity for all. The meaning insertion of dangers into the environment makes all possible relations to the danger feasible—including symbolic ones. It is here where the study of religious sentiments by active human beings in their social surroundings becomes a new—or renewed³—frontier for the social sciences. Religion is a social system of spirituality that operates as a catalytic environment for human ways of being (Belzen, 2016). Elsa de Mattos (de Mattos, 2018; de Mattos & Chaves, 2016) has demonstrated how the entrance of a young man into the setting of candomblé guides his transformation into a new form of being. Joining the community enabled the man to reform himself and then establish his autonomous way of living—free from the previous dependences on drugs and alcohol.

Art as Catalyst for Human Affect

What we regularly label as “art” is the result of human creativity over millennia, the functions of which were not for giving their creators aesthetic pleasure but those myriads of reasons that would link the art maker with the world “out there”—in the imaginary domain where ancestors are still alive and where they themselves join them, sooner or later. Being extensions from the meaning-making person on one’s own body (e.g., necklaces, beads, etc.), the creation of symbolic forms expanded to that of clothing, surrounding living quarters, and special places for the interchanges with the spirits. The making of symbolic objects—first for specific functions (e.g., masks) that later became “art” (at least in the occidental mindset)—can be analyzed as a massive social practice of creation of catalytic devices for supporting different life problems’ solving in the future. A roadside shrine of any religious kind is a semiotic catalytic device once put there by some author, but in its existence over centuries enables the passing-by travelers to feel in some particular ways—rather than others.

The emergence of the genre of pure landscape painting in Renaissance Europe in the sixteenth century and its continuation to our days are an extreme example of creating wholistic scenes of nature which are the result of the painter’s imagination (and drawing skills) and came to be of demand by paying collectors of paintings. In contrast to portrait paintings—where the function was to preserve the images of oneself and of one’s forebearers for next generations—landscape paintings did not have such personal connectivity with the objects painted. Many of the scenes painted were imaginary⁴—in the Netherlandish art of the seventeenth century, scenes of Dutch villages or towns on the foreground, with Italian-type mountain images in the background, abounded. The painters connected the immediately visible with the imagery—resulting in sublime paintings that would keep their new owners fascinated for long times as the paintings would hang in their ordinary living places.

The roots of landscape painting in Europe are in the depiction of imaginary landscapes of no physical referent as the background for depicting Biblical scenes. The nature depicted in the paintings or graphic sheets of how the apple-eating couple of Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden was lavish. Step by step in the history of painting arriving in Renaissance, the Biblical figures disappeared or became kept less in focus (see Fig. 8.7), while the nature remained depicted as lavish as before or more.

Fig. 8.7

Claude Lorrain’s Coastal Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657)

Together with the avalanche of Protestant Reformation and its iconoclastic vicissitudes against Catholic images, the religious meaning in paintings became clandestine—resulting in the eighteenth-century gnoseognostic ideology of viewing the nature as the ultimate proof of divine creation. Religious figures in paintings were no longer necessary, but exaggerated geological formations acquired their functions in their sign values. Further transformation of the genre into Romantic landscape painting in the nineteenth century (e.g., German version started by Caspar David Friedrich and the Norwegian counterpart of Johan Christian Dahl) grows out of turning the religious feelings into secular-aesthetic enjoyment of the painted landscapes in Romantic terms.

Referring to the paintings by Claude Lorrain (Fig. 8.7) and Jacob van Ruysdael (Fig. 8.8), which were both in Dresden galleries in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Carl Gustav Carus reflected upon them in his classic 1820s sequence of Nine Letters About Landscape Painting:

… before which you and I could never stand without involuntarily drawing a deep breath, filled with the sense of a cheerful, warmer, southern air; but you also remember the waters, both rushing and still, and the grave beech and oak trees, which Ruysdael presents to us with such infinite freedom and truth that our beloved native landscape seems almost to speak to us directly. Here we may say that the artist’s inner meaning has assumed objective form; both artists’ work convinces us that they had absorbed the life of nature into themselves, in all its beauty and grandeur, and that it pulsed through their veins and sinews, enabling him to speak to us in nature’s language, and to reflect its forms in all their pristine beauty. Hence the feeling of freedom and well-being that overcomes us when we stand before these paintings: we are aware of a beautiful, human individuality that allows us to contemplate its inner essence reflected in the mirror of the true divine world—that is to say, in the truth of nature—and does so freely and calmly, making no attempt to direct us toward any particular view, but at ease in its own blissful contentment; thereby moving us to lay aside all our petty, one-sided concerns…. (Carus, 2002/1831, pp. 108–109, added emphasis)

Fig. 8.8

Jacob van Ruysdael Waterfall with a Ruined Castle (1665–1670)

Two aspects of the landscape paintings are important to emphasize in the present discussion of catalytic process of the human psyche. First, the paintingsare second-order (semiotic) catalysts—they are depictions of real or imaginary views of the nature and its modifications. In contrast with the first-order catalysts—the totality of the meaning field of the person who experiences the natural scene—the paintings have limited dimensions (Lorrain’s is 102 × 136 cm, Ruysdael’s 119 × 180 cm in canvas size). Yet the deep experience that a viewer can generate within oneself is comparable despite this contextual miniaturization. The paintings—like original landscapes—act as catalysts in the viewer’s own creation of their own affective states in the given setting. The paintings do not cause feelings in the viewers, but the act by the viewers to look at them makes it possible for the viewers to arrive at new feelings.⁵

Where Chemistry Ends and Semiotic Catalysis Begins

The notion of catalysis entered into chemistry over long time—from 1830s (starting with the pioneering work of Jens Jacob Berzelius) to 1909 (Wilhelm Ostwald’s receiving Nobel Prize). Its entrance has eliminated the traditional causality discourse from the discipline and opened doors for further innovative thinking in biology. The entrance of the ideas of catalysis into social sciences has taken a further century—the first volume suggesting it for psychology’s metalanguage appeared only in 2014 (Cabell & Valsiner, 2014). Its appearance into sociology, economics, history, and anthropology is still to be seen.

One of the most prolific extenders of the catalysis concept in chemistry in the twentieth century—Alwin Mittasch—paved the way to its possible introduction (Fig. 8.9) back in 1938, leaving the psychological side of the pyramid unfilled.

Fig. 8.9

The pyramid of catalytic processes (Alwin Mittasch, 1938)

As we can observe from Fig. 8.9, Mittasch had deterministic hopes for psychology as science which neither psychology nor other social sciences can in principle fulfill (as open systems, their phenomena thrive on indeterminacy). The downward regulation idea (from conscious will to unconscious wishes) was also accepted by him. Coming to catalysis notions from semiotic cultural psychology, it is not possible to see as conscious will as determiner of lower-level processes, but as the starting point of further levels of catalytic regulation that reaches out to other levels of organization in society that are covered by other social sciences (Fig. 8.10).

Fig. 8.10

Semiotic catalysis (reconstruction of the Mittasch Pyramid)

Figure 8.10 integrates Mittasch’s efforts to make sense of catalysis in the physical-chemical world with that of the social sciences. In the latter case we axiomatically view catalytic processes as constructed by the intentional human beings. That intentionality is semiotically mediated—a qualitatively new state in the hierarchy of catalysts. Transition to that state is prepared by the catalytic systems at biological level.

The Cultural System of Catalysis: Preparing for the Future

Mittasch could not solve the problem of catalysis for the realm of the social sciences. The normative and intentional nature of the latter calls for the higher—cultural—catalytic systems to be conceptualized.

The crucial feature of the phenomena in the social sciences is the flexibility. Our intentional coordination of conditions of personal and collective cultures (Valsiner, 2014) with social representations in society is a feature absent at the lower levels of catalysis. This is made possible for the use of sign systems at various levels—personal, communal, societal, economic, and political. We can look at human phenomena as semiotically catalyzed. Semiotically,

Meaning appears only due to a contact between code relations. A contact between (incompatible) codes which activates semiosis, requires a living system. This is because semiosis assumes a mechanism of learning, i.e. a mechanism that can create new codes (therefore to restore and to reproduce) which is just a feature of the living systems. (Kull, 2014, p. 118)

We produce (and reproduce) sign complexes that catalyze our ways of being human. This is possible due to the double function of signs we create and use, as we operate with signs on the constantly moving border of the PRESENT in between the FUTURE and the PAST. The primary function of a sign is to grant the meanings of action in here and now. The secondary function of the sign is to provide hyper-generalized meaning field for the future—to be utilized at any moment of need to put into place a catalytic condition.

A number of interesting features emerge from the notion of double functions of signs. First, the human meaning making in the present is oriented to the future—immediate (here and now giving meaning to the unfolding experience) and indeterminate—setting up anticipatory meaning orientation for possible future conditions (de Mattos, 2018). It is the latter that produce the basis for semiotic catalysts.

Figure 8.11 also illustrates the aboutness of the future and the meaning-based borders that semiotic catalysis enables to get introduced. The border between the desired and the non-desired directions (both characterized as zones with non-fixed outer borders) is enabled by the process of hyper-generalized signs. As Alaric Kohler has pointed out,

Catalysts operate by removing or replacing a constraint on variability. (Kohler, 2014, p. 69)

Thus, the indeterminacy of the future is precisely the reason for creating catalytic conditions for future events long before they are on the psychological horizon:

The psychological horizon is the infinite realm of possibilities ahead of time yet to be semiotized, thus still partially socially unbounded, that is necessary as a reference point to the person’s widening of life space. The horizon/sign is the specific sign that, once produced, establishes the conditions for the psychological horizon to participate in the production of new psychological phenomena through the co-regulation of psychological processes. (Tateo, 2014, p. 236)

Here we come to the central issue of all social sciences—handling of the transition of the concreteness of the present toward the inevitably uncertain future. The notion of forward-oriented semiotic catalysis here has theoretical advantages over strict sign-regulated control that becomes possible in the present moment (S in Fig. 8.11).

Fig. 8.11

Making of catalysts through double function of signs

Guiding the Semiotic Catalytic Roles in the Future

The presence of a hyper-generalized sign field as a catalyst projected into the future has the flexibility to be usable in a particular direction when the semiotic agent (person, institution, etc.) needs it. Yet such catalytic fields for the future need to be established in the here-and-now setting. Da Silva (2014) introduced the notion of semiotic catalyst activator—a sign that in the present guides the establishment of the catalytic sign field for the future. Through such activators the future field of semiotic catalysts is directed in desired or expected directions, such as moral self-expectations (Nedergaard, Valsiner, & Marsico, 2015), sensual-religious feelings of temple dancers (Valsiner, 1996), or the hyper-generalized expectation for social revelations of guilt within a civil society (Brinkmann, 2010) or of violence within family (Musaeus & Brinkmann, 2011). The outcomes of such activators are creating meaning-construction atmospheres within a given person or society. Phenomena of witch-hunting, suspicions of espionage by foreigners, expectations for physical and sexual violence from different socially stigmatized outgroups, and much more—all the histories of human societies—are filled with examples of the work of semiotic catalyst activators.

The semiotic catalyst activator signs are activated by the sign maker to guarantee that not every hyper-generalized sign takes on catalytic functions. These are meta-level signs that act upon the directions of field-like signs to guide them either into becoming promoter signs (directly impacting on the meaning construction) or catalytic frames (enabling the work of other promoter signs). A single case example of how a young US college student following at first his father’s White supremacist ideology not only overcomes it (negates the inherent racism in society) but develops a new personal life course crossing the race lines in his own marrying life (see Mascolo, 2017, for full description).

Two specific features in the transition of the young White supremacist into a flexible human being who succumbs to the affective attraction across race borders are relevant here to see the semiotic catalyst activator in action. First is the “base line” of deeply embodied interracial feelings of negative kind—not directly expressed. In fact he was socialized to keep his feelings toward other races strictly under personal control. The young man recalled only one different episode—when he was on a wrestling for extra sports credit in high school:

The only time I got to release my frustration was when I wrestled—especially those Blacks in competition extra curriculum activities at school. I thought about my people and what their people were doing to mine. And I was satisfied at the sound and sight of making their face hit the mat and if I was lucky, drawing blood. Afterward I would run for the shower wiping away the filth of the disgusting contact and scent scrubbing vigorously for almost an hour. They were one and the same and not my people I can give a damn about them. (Mascolo, 2017, p. 232 added emphasis)

The deep—yet externally invisible—interracial separation and dismissal were in place as a result of polite socialization. The opposition “we” <> “they” was the main guidance of relating with others. Yet the strong opposition coming from family socialization had a potential for transformation—through the curiosity of the young man trying to get the glimpse of the “other,” even if staying on one’s own established ideological position. It took slowly developing affective innovation for the young man to transcend that position.

Love has been powerful in making changes in our mundane ways of living possible. While in college, circumstances brought the young man into joint study task with a Black girl—step by step moving toward deep personal relationship. Again the pre-established internalized dismissal of the other was in place as he tried to avoid the joint assignments and verbal challenges (“go to your people”, ibid., p. 233). Yet the joint work did build an attraction (and decision that “she was an exception to her people”). While this slow un-racializing interpersonal process was going on, an encounter with a Black male student whom he despised yet became curious about his capacity to enter into interaction with others. Our supremacist decided “to play liberal”:

“Hey man why are you always talking to White girls?” He looked at me conspicuously … He responded “Well it don’t look like I got many options at this school. Say man, you wanna give me a hand with this box?". On another day I would have obviously said “hell no” but I needed more answers “Why do you get along with White people?” “Huh?” “You have nothing in common with them… us” I replied calmly. He let out a slight chuckle before replying, “Sure we do, we usually like to have fun and play and watch sports. I mean what has race have to do with getting’ along with people?” I gave no expression not wanting to admit that he had actually made a bit of a point. And even though he was a Black basketball player he was not as dumb as I thought he would be. (Mascolo, 2017, pp. 234–235, added emphasis)

This episode is an example of the agent’s (“supremacist”) move toward creating a semiotic catalyst activator that would enable him to accept the other race in principle—when his own immediate interaction benefitted from it. The simple doubt (“what has race to do with it?”) that produced the “bit of a point” actually led to overcoming of the strict stigmatization “my people” <> “your people” and creating an atmosphere of personal acceptance of openness. It is through regulating the nature of background atmospheres that social systems set the stage for all of the normatively possible and impossible actions—as well as their change.

Cases of structural transformations of normatively regulated developing systems lead to the need for the adoption of new formalizing systems for the social sciences. The axioms of the general linear model do not fit the tensions in linearizing <> curvilinearizing social and psychological processes. New formal models of nonquantitative mathematics are likely to innovate the social sciences. For example, topological innovations allow for making sense of the phenomena of borders in human minds and activities. Borders—in biological sense membranes—play crucial role in all systemic perspectives. New methodologies of the study of maintenance and transformation of social borders at all levels—psychological, sociological, economic, and political—are the next horizon toward which the philosophy of social sciences can strive.

Conclusion: Normative Sciences Need Systemic Developmental Epistemology

The issue raised in this chapter is wider than simply a choice between causality discourse and its catalytic counterpart. After all, the causal models can be emulated into the wider catalytic scheme as linearizing mindsets in the field of phenomena that require nonlinear models to maintain the crucial nature of the phenomena in our generalizations.

Historically the story was the other way around—catalytic models emerged in the opposite order—from overcoming the non-systemic focus of common sense and discovering the basic cyclical nature of self-maintaining and developing systems. The systemic-structural nature of catalytic processes is essential for making sense of dynamic complexity (Toomela, 2014). Social systems are nonlinear systems ready to produce unexpected and contradictory outcomes. Such surprises and contradictions are not aberrations of normativity, but a necessary result of societal development where normative constraints are constantly being reorganized.

Still there is the additional feature of normative systems—where psychology takes the lead as it links the biological, psychological, and socioeconomic sides of human action (Brinkmann, 2016, pp. 11–14)—that of intentionalityto resist and reorganize the normative systems (Chaudhary, Hviid, Marsico, & Villadsen, 2017). Whether it is an adolescent resisting the parents, disadvantaged social groups resisting their status, or dominant groups resisting giving up their power—any systemic account in social sciences needs to include the potentiality of specific resistances into its schemes. Social sciences introduce a new demand for philosophy of science—to account for the agency of purposeful actors and their co(unter)-actions in any generalized scheme of catalytic processes. This demand is an opportunity that may lead all social sciences toward understanding the dramatic realities of the human condition.