The chapter begins by mapping challenges to interdisciplinary research, then opens the door to an inclusive form of explanatory pluralism. Remaining discussion is framed around the two stages of interdisciplinary research: first, acquiring knowledge of findings across fields and methods, and second, integrating that knowledge into an explanation. To facilitate learning at the first stage, this chapter charts in some detail five distinct explanations (from cultural studies, social psychology, biology, ecology, and genetics) of the unique features of the shame system as it is present in Chinese culture. Each is important and essential, despite the fact that these explanations are routinely treated as incompatible with one another. To facilitate learning at the second stage, the chapter introduces a recently developed framework for integrating research across fields known as cultural evolutionary theory.

This book, as well as the project of which it is part, has been premised on the assumption that exposure to findings from disciplines other than their own will improve researchers’ understanding of Chinese morality. The purpose of this volume is to provide readers with discoveries and results about Chinese morality from more than a dozen fields of study and, critically, to do so in terms that everyone, whether or not versed in statistical analysis or neuroimaging, sociological theory, or Han Dynasty history, will understand.

Together we authors of this volume hope to illuminate the main body of Chinese morality and flourishing, as well as several of its corners and crevasses, to enable its readers to create in their own reflections and research better integration and synthesis on this topic. Due to this motivation, the essays are bound together by a commitment to understanding the relations between their findings through a cultural evolutionary paradigm. In practice, this means that each essay makes a good faith effort to draw upon the fruits of the others under a methodological assumption that substantive causal and explanatory relations crisscross our research. Our authorship group includes researchers in neuroscience and anthropology, developmental psychology and literature, history and social psychology and Asian studies, philosophy and behavioral ecology, and more. The challenges to substantive engagement across the varied methods represented by these fields include the fact that most of us lack opportunities for substantive dialog with researchers so far from our native fields of inquiry. In the context of this project, this challenge was surmounted with a multi-day workshop in Hong Kong in December 2019. Meeting together by itself does not produce the depth of engagement needed to allow us to understand and map intersecting lines of causal and explanatory relations between findings of different fields. That goal was facilitated by each author represented here reading and commenting on the draft papers of the other authors. This step pushed us to an awareness of the breadth of explanations concerning Chinese morality, to an appreciation of the methods and skills used across represented fields, and to a hope for cross-disciplinary convergence.

The first stage in reaching an interdisciplinary understanding of a complex phenomenon is to create understanding about the research findings from a multitude of areas for researchers. This book mostly occupies this stage. Here this involves presentation of the latest research discoveries about Chinese morality and flourishing, and discussion of the means and methods with which these discoveries were made. Completing this stage is cause for some celebration since it is rare that a diversity of understandings is created about the same thing in people who use vastly different, seemingly incommensurable methods for their research.

The second stage in arriving at an interdisciplinary understanding of a complex phenomenon involves integrating the findings from a multitude of fields into a single coherent explanation. The second stage seems to require four steps: employing explanatory pluralism and treating each component explanation as valuable; identifying the relative contributions of or strengths of each explanation in creating understanding of the complex phenomenon at issue; formulating bridge laws that allow for inter-theoretic inferences between component explanations; and using those bridge laws to unify the component explanations with some degree of harmony.

This book takes several steps into the second, integrative stage in an effort to enable its readers to get the most out of it. This introductory essay contains a case study of shame in Chinese culture and its multi-disciplinary explanation to illustrate stage one research and point to the value of creating understanding across disciplines about a single complex phenomenon. This essay concludes with a short philosophy of science discussion of types of explanation and puts explanation in the context of cultural evolutionary theory, which is the best means of unifying diverse results about Chinese morality. (Numbers of recent books have introduced cultural evolutionary theory, including Mesoudi (2011), Laland (2017), Boyd (2018), Lewens (2015), Henrich (2016), Fuentes (2017), Heyes (2018), Tomasello (2019), and Henrich (2020).) We now continue by discussing why creating cross-disciplinary understanding about morality is fraught with problems, essential though it is.

In one of the most influential pieces in the philosophy of science, Hempel and Oppenheim write, “By the explanandum, we understand the sentence describing the phenomenon to be explained (not that phenomenon itself); by the explanans, the class of those sentences which are adduced to account for the phenomenon” (1948, 152). The dominance of the Hempel-Oppenheim model, often called the ‘Deductive-Nomological’ model, of scientific explanation is likely responsible for providing impediments to multi-disciplinary explanations. In multi-disciplinary environments often one researcher's explanandum is another's explanans. This gives rise to situations that thwart understanding, situations in which one researcher claims to have explained what can be explained and dismisses rival explanations. This leads to rejection of the explanatory power of ‘culture’, which we define as socially learned and transmitted information (see below). Among these dismissals, E.O. Wilson writes “genes have culture on a leash.” Like-minded remarks from a single field are found in Table 1.1.

In surprising ways, these attitudes are reminiscent of the reception with which Charles Darwin's publications met in his own time. Today opposition to construing scientific explanations as relevant to cultural explananda comes not from literal adherence to a religious canon but from a distant cousin, one whose sources we will not pause to introduce with any ceremony. Renowned 20th-century sociologists and cultural anthropologists (Mead 2001 [1935], 262), cultural theorists (Barthes 1972, 135), and feminist philosophers (Moller Okin 1989, 134) have repudiated the relevance of the biological sciences to understanding gender, for example. Instead, gender is widely regarded as product of culture alone and causally uninfluenced by biological sex, sex hormones, the sex chromosome, etc. Present-day philosophical opponents of the explanatory power of evolutionary psychological explanations, such as David Buller and Jesse Prinz, join in. Buller writes, “there is no such thing as human nature” (Buller 2005, 457) and, “organisms that belong to the same species need not share any properties” (448). According to Buller, evolutionary psychologists think that we are “a legion of idiot savants” who, like “Fred and Wilma Flintstone,” appear in the modern world with a stone age mind (112). Prinz (2015) appears to systematically misread a host of twins studies in order to remove any significant contribution of genetics to the understanding of emotion and morality. The psychologists and geneticists conducting these rigorous twins studies repeatedly show genetic influences on behaviors and calculate how heritable are these behaviors. This implies that many behaviors shared by monozygotic twins are not produced merely by culture or shared environment; many behavior homologies are produced by shared functional DNA. A leading twins researcher concludes that Prinz's discussion maligns and “does considerable disservice to” twin studies (Segal 2013, 646). Broadly, philosophical attitudes in the grips of anti-science ideologies often dissolve trust between humanities and social sciences. If evolution or genetics or ancestral pathogen load or latitude plays roles in the natural history of Chinese morality, Prinz and Buller, like humanities scholars of an earlier generation, appear to foreclose on under...