It is common to read bad-tempered exchanges between social anthropologists on the one hand, and evolutionary theorists on the other, regarding the potential for evolutionary theory to reform and invigorate the social sciences. (See, for example, the recent exchange between Alex Mesoudi and collaborators, and Tim Ingold.) Cultural evolutionists sometimes come away from such exchanges wondering if social anthropologists are even aiming to study human societies and human culture in a ‘scientific’ way, or whether they have some wholly different goal in mind. The aim of this project is to diagnose the deep philosophical disputes about the nature of investigation and explanation which underlie these debates, and to work towards an evolutionary framework that takes the concerns of social and cultural anthropology seriously. To give just one example of the issues to be addressed here, Clifford Geertz has drawn on explicitly philosophical considerations to suggest that an understanding of culture should not proceed along the lines of the natural sciences:

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." (Geertz, "Thick Descriptions", 1973, p. 5)

One might think Geertz’s "webs of significance [man] himself has spun" could be translated with little loss of content into the evolutionary language of "niche-construction". According to this influential view, the cultural environment is sustained by the niche-constructing action of humans; cultural niches have impact on subsequent evolutionary and developmental trajectories of human populations; and different human populations occupy different cultural niches.

This attempted rapprochement is incomplete, because it fails to address deeper concerns about the very possibility of a general framework within which one might construct explanations for intentional behaviour. Very roughly speaking, the thought (examined in the work of philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Wilfred Sellars) is that an effort to expose ‘webs of significance’ requires interpretation of meaning, and interpretation of this kind is not the sort of thing that falls under the domain of general scientific laws. Understood in this way, the opposition of social anthropology to an evolutionary framework might be understood as a special case of opposition to any law-governed science of interpretation. At this point a number of powerful responses open up to the cultural evolutionist, which this research will aim to examine.