I haven't yet received any feedback on my recent post on sociobiology/"evolutionary" pysch. But I thought I would head off a few obvious objections from folks disposed to accept the legitimacy of such projects.
First, I'm not putting forward some position to the effect that "everything is just socially constructed" and there is not such thing as the "natural". I'm not saying that science, as such, is just mere political ideology (although it is clearly an instrument put in the service ends, and often unjust ends at that). My claim is that the facts about what human beings are like contradict the pseudo-scientific theories that fall under the heading of "sociobiology". My claim is that such projects are bad science.
These folks like to talk about "human nature". But there are deep confusions lodged at the heart of this idea. We talk about the idea often enough, but what exactly does it mean? What are we really asking when we ask if human beings are "naturally selfish", say?
It seems to me that we presuppose a mechanistic, objectified picture of human beings when we ask such questions. We assume that we are like computers and we then ask what the programming is like. This metaphor is deeply misleading.
A better way of thinking about our "nature" is a follows. Human beings, because of the way that we are biologically constituted, have certain capacities, natural powers that we can exercise in a variety of ways. We have the capacity for creativity, to ask ourselves questions like "should I have done x?", to reflect on abstract theoretical matters, and so forth. We have the capacity to feel a rich array of different kinds of pleasures and pains. We have a certain degree of plasticity: we can determine who we are in some sense (and this is why the difficult life choice of deciding "who you want to be" is so hard... any theory that suggested such a choice was easy or pre-determined is clearly missing something). We have the capacity to be responsive to reasons, though we often fail for various reasons to be so responsive. Having a capacity doesn't mean it must be exercised.
To be sure, affective impulses and motivations need to be taken into account- but such matters are hardly as simple as having a transparent "desire set" or a collection of "revealed preferences" or whatever. Moreover, any plausible theory of human agency would have to make the distinction between "natural" desires and "conventional" desires. As Raymond Geuss puts it, "it is by no means obvious that the hunger that is satisfied when Neolithic human tore raw meat with their fingers is the same kind of thing as the hunger that is satisfied by dining in a five-star restaurant in 2008." The broader point here, however, is that we have the capacity to not act on desires, whatever their grounding may be, as when the heroin addict decides to buck his overwhelming desire to continue taking the drug in order to begin recovery. To say that there must be some "higher order" desire dictating and mechanistically determining this person's desire to get sober is ad hoc and implausible; nobody working at a rehab clinic would agree that such an assumption makes sense at all. The point is that the addict could relapse, or she could not; the genuine uncertainty is what makes the job of helping addicts get clean so difficult.
Let's take a slightly different tack. To suppose that human behavior is mechanistically determined or predictable is a bit like making the following mistake. Suppose someone gave you a set of oil paints, a brush and a blank canvas and told you that you had to create some art object with only those materials. Now, clearly, there would be constraints on what you could do with those materials. You couldn't, for example, create a marble statue out of them. You couldn't make a film with them. But there is a wide array of possibilities before you nonetheless, as the history of painting makes clear. It would be absurd to say that because you had certain materials with certain physical constraints, that those materials determined (mechanistically) what it is that you would end up painting. It would be absurd to say that the subsequent artwork was predetermined by the materials you used in some law like way. But that is just like saying human beings are determined by their biological constitution. Giving us facts about our constitution doesn't yet say anything about what human agency is like. It's like saying that because you know how my bike is configured and what its function is, you're therefore in a position to say exactly where I'm going to ride on it. Absurd, to say the least.
There is a distinction between having some generative capacity to do something, and being mechanistically caused to do something. Adobe Photoshop, for example, is an open-ended platform that allows users to do a huge array of different things. But it does not follow that each time I use Photoshop that I am just being determined by Photoshop. It doesn't follow that Photoshop mechanistically causes and thus determines whatever I end up doing with it. The same mistake is made when we think about human powers and capacities in a mechanistic way.
So I am by no means ignoring or denying that we're part of the natural world: we have natural powers and capacities in virtue of which we are properly called "human". And I would be the first to say that we should investigate them scientifically and learn more about them. But the fact that we have natural powers and capacities doesn't give us much to go on if we want to understand what human behavior (or human societies, culture, or social norms, etc.) is going to be like in the future. That would be a bit like saying that because I knew you had a brush and a certain set of paints that I could mechanistically determine, from a mere analysis of those artistic materials, exactly what imagine you must end up painting. That is patently absurd. There is no way to draw a valid inference like that from a mere analysis of the paints and brushes. Every one of these pseudo-scientific charlatans should be forced to read Nelson Goodman's excellent 1954 Fact, Fiction and Forecast, particularly his famous article "The New Riddle of Induction".
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Follow-up on "Evolutionary" Psychology
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Against "Evolutionary" Psychology
There is a tendency these days (anyone teaching in a university setting cannot fail to notice how thoroughly students exemplify it) to assume that anything that aspires to the mantle of "hard science" is therefore legitimate and has something important to tell us about topics as far flung as social justice, economic growth, sexuality, interpersonal relations and the structure of human agency.
What I mean by "hard science", of course, is the paradigm (the characteristic methods, assumptions and so forth) exemplified by Newtonian physics. In Newtonian physics, we're after mechanical explanations of the phenomena about which physics theorizes. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, "at the core of the notion of mechanical explanation is a conception of invariances specified by law-like generalizations. To cite a cause is to cite a necessary condition or a sufficient condition or a necessary and sufficient condition as the antecedent of whatever behavior is to be explained." As far as the practical aims of physics are concerned, such methods and assumptions seem to be warranted and justified.
It is not clear that the same is true of the scientific study of human behavior. Whereas a "number of thinkers in the 17th and 18th century" may have been forgiven for transferring the "ideal of mechanical explanation from physics to the understanding of human behavior", there is little excuse for such a mistake today. The material motivations to do so ("scientific" technocratic management practices, business accounting, social control, etc.), however, are important for understanding why the mistake persists. Why, however, is the application of mechanistic explanation to human action a mistake?
There is a lot to say about this, and I wouldn't pretend to be able to give a full answer here. But let us first just take a moment to consider what it would be to understand human action mechanistically. It would mean, first of all, to hold that all talk of "intentions, purposes, and reasons for action" must be entirely eliminated, or reduced to talk, crudely put, of "matter in motion" (or, if you like, of a person's genetic makeup, or her "evolutionary" hard-wired disposition to perform certain behaviors that have the macro-function of preserving the species or whatever).
If merely stating what the view entails isn't enough to convince you of its unsoundness, let me say two further things. First, it is obvious that such theories put forward controversial claims. But from what standpoint are such claims made? They are self-consciously made from the standpoint of a rational human scientist testing the soundness of a hypothesis. But if this human scientist accepts what the mechanistic approach says about human action (namely, that it is causally determined by asocial, non-rational factors reducible to "matter in motion"), what is she to make of her own scientific undertaking? That is to say, what is she to make of herself and what she's up to? What is she to make of what she's doing when she proposes, tests, evaluates, defends and rationally reflects on scientific theories in the scientific community? If her own theory were true, it would clearly undermine the practice of science itself, for what could the scientist herself be doing if not merely expressing, say, her irrational "hard-wired" casually-determined impulse to behave in certain ways? Think about it: what would it be to rationally justify a scientific theory if that were true? That is, if we eliminate all talk of intentions, beliefs, purposes, reasons, etc. then how could we plausibly make sense of the practices of evaluating theories, testing hypotheses, reflecting on the consistency of scientific arguments, etc?
This is all a way of saying that the mechanistic view objectifies, and thus distorts, its object of study (human behavior). Human action, and the complex social formations in which such actions occur, is not like the weather. We have no reason to assume that human behavior is law-like, predictable, and mechanically explainable in the same way that the weather is. In fact, all of the facts about humans about which we are most confident suggest that such assumptions radically misconstrue and distort what human beings are like. The obvious inference to draw, then, is that our methods must be different from those which we use to make sense of weather. Methodology must be appropriate to assaying its object of study. It would be absurd to stubbornly impose inappropriate methods and concepts on some phenomena and expect the phenomena to give way (yet, as an aside, I note that this is more or less exactly what neoclassical economists do).
The second thing I'll say is this. Imagine that you are reflecting on some putatively scientific theory of human behavior. Suppose that you are reflecting on whether or not it is sound, viz. whether or not is the most plausible theory about such matters. Suppose further that the theory you are reflecting about is a mechanistic one, viz. one in which all human behavior is explained in terms of the agent's motivation to "pass on" her genes. Now, in evaluating such a theory, you couldn't take a merely external perspective. You, after all, are a human agent. And any theory of human agency must have something to say about what it's like from the inside, viz. what it's like to be a human agent. So you'd have to ask yourself: have I ever thought about any action I undertook in terms of whether or not it satisfies the goal of "passing on my genes"? The answer that every single human being ever would unequivocally have given to such a question is "no". After all, for most of human history we didn't even have the concept of a gene, and such biological matters weren't even studied until relatively recently. So it can't be that we have always been consciously acting in that way; if the theory were true we'd have to be determined wholesale by forces about which we could have no direct awareness. If true, the theory suggests that something is radically mistaken about all of our ordinary practical concerns, daily reasons for action, (indeed all of our communicative practices in which we offer reasons to others in order to justify the ways in which our action impinges on their lives), etc. In other words, if true, the theory holds that we are all radically mistaken about what it is we're doing when we act in the world.
This is obviously a bit of a problem for any plausible theory of human behavior, for more reasons that I can count. First, such a theory appears to radically distort it's own object of study on the basis of unsupported, unjustified assumptions (i.e. that the exact methods and mechanistic assumptions of physics and natural science are appropriate to the social/human sciences). Second, the theory undermines the possibility of justifying itself, because it undermines the process of offering reasons in defense of beliefs, viz. it undermines the idea that human beings are responsive to reasons. Third, such a theory, in requiring ex ante that its object be predictable and law-governed, sets itself the insurmountable task of explaining how complex and dynamic the development of human history has been. There is more to say, but let us stop there.
So, what has this to do with "evolutionary" psychology? Well, it should be clear that the very form of some of its explanations of human behavior are radically misconceived. Human behavior is an extremely complex phenomenon, and establishing a clear link between certain facts about a person's genetic makeup and their behavior would require a scientific theory more precise, more articulated, and more robust than any "evolutionary" psychologist could reasonably say that they possess. Any sober practician of such a project would surely admit that what they are doing is highly speculative. After all, surely they know about the problem of underdetermination of theories by the data. Or, surely they would concede that some of the behaviors they observe could be overdetermined in important ways: if 17 different variables, 16 of them social/political/historical/etc., contribute to a certain behavior, on what basis can we reasonably attribute sufficient causation to just one of those (putative) variables, namely, someone's genes? This is pure quackery. Rigorous scientists have the modesty to tell us that even the relationship between dog breed and dog behavior is not well understood. But these "evolutionary" psychological zealots sell us trumped-up speculative non-sense as clearly verified fact. That is a crime and a serious detriment to the entire idea of what science is. It distorts the scientific content of evolutionary theory itself. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Stephen Jay Gould made this point forcefully in the wake of the re-emergence of eugenics under the name of "sociobiology". But that hasn't stopped ideologists for the existing order from running with genetic-determinism.
But, as I suggested above, we should not assume that the wide currency and popularity of such "theories" is due to some understandable error in reasoning. No, the wide currency of such views has to be explained politically. They are popular because they are discussed so often, and they are discussed so often because they fit cleanly into existing legitimating frameworks. The status quo almost always justifies its myriad inequalities by telling us that they are inevitable and natural (rather than contingent and open to the conscious re-shaping by human beings).
We should be far more skeptical about the findings of psychology. Any fair appraisal of psychology must take seriously the implicit disagreements generated by the disciplines of political science, economics and sociology- all of which ostensibly study similar subject matter. Moreover, any legitimate appraisal would have to answer the objections posed by philosophy as to the methodology and normative assumptions undergirding the practice.
But at the very least, the unsatisfactory paradigms within the discipline itself that have dominated over the last 80 years (from radical behaviorism to introspectionism), should give one pause as to whether to jump on the bandwagon of the latest craze.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Return of Eugenics
I'm only writing this post because my genes are configured in a particular way. At least that's the view of the social world that we get from crude, pseudo-scientific bullshit like the views pedaled in this article on marriage.
What is scientific about the suggestions and innuendo in this article? I'm not sure. Science proceeds by putting forward hypotheses, while attempting to show that the available evidence is explained well by these hypotheses. What reasons have we to think that immutable facts of our genetic makeup explain social phenomena? Very few. It's rather obvious to anyone doing serious work in social science or psychology that the pseudo-scientific speculation pedaled in books like The Selfish Gene is false. It is also worth pointing out that even the connection between behavior and "breed" in dogs is not well-understood by scientists. If pressed, any of the charlatans penning "pop-science" books on the tight connection between genes and social phenomena will concede that what they're saying is wild speculation.
But there are more important questions to ask here. In particular, what is it about our society that makes eugenic views so convenient and apparently plausible? We must keep in mind here that the current vogue of eugenics and genetic-determinist ideas about social/political phenomena has nothing to do with evidence or facts.
Genetic-determinist "theories" are simple and easy to state. They are free of the complications that, sorry to say, are in fact parts of social phenomena. But most importantly, these ideas fit neatly and cleanly into existing configurations of power. There is no friction between them and the status quo.
Thus we find these "theories" in popular outlets like the NYTimes because they are ways of making sense of the social world that suggest that things are as they should be. The message is clear: if we're hardwired to be racists... why struggle against such things? If certain "races" are genetically predisposed to behave in certain ways... why aim for political equality? If women are genetically hardwired such that they are deferential and conventionally "feminine", then why criticize existing gender norms and hierarchies? This could go on and on.
I don't think that therapists and psychoanalysts have been wrong to focus on family history and other contingent features of a life when interpreting drives, desires and neuroses. Nor have social theorists been wrong to focus on big structural features of societies when they think about institutions like marriage and how they change over time.
It is far from obvious to me that considerations of this sort should be alien to an examination of "marriage stability". Are we to think that, for example, severe economic hardship has no real implications for the stability of a marriage?
Moreover, political theorists and historians have not been wrong to examine the ways in which changes in societies, political configurations and so on often track political struggles directed towards changing them. The Womens' Movement of the 60s and 70s, for example, radically changed the way that Americans think about heterosexual marriage relations. Moreover, the black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 60s shattered a certain configuration of power in the South that was basically a form of apartheid. Of course, racism and sexual oppression still persist in potent forms, but it is undeniable that things have changed quite a bit since the suffocating conformism and patriarchy of the 1950s. And, most importantly, the reason they changed had to do with active political struggles on the part of the oppressed, NOT genetic configurations causing people to act in certain ways rather than others.
But if you accept the genetic-determinist story... why struggle? Why think that social relations could change? If the genetic-determinist account tries to say that can also explain why people struggle against certain configurations of power, then it just looks entirely ad hoc and incapable of being falsified. This brings out, I think, just how speculative and underspecified these approaches are and, thus, why they are so dangerous. They can give a "scientific" veneer of credibility to whatever you like: racism, sexism, you name it.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't any facts about human psychology or behavior that derive from natural features of our constitution. On the contrary- we have certain naturally given capacities in virtue of which we are human. But our faculties and capacities include the ability to reflect on reasons for which we act, and to choose whether or not to endorse such reasons.
