Continuing to research evolutionary psychology

Helen Longino gave a talk at Brown a couple of months ago, advocating a pluralistic approach to the study of human behavior.  She condemned various reductionist approaches, including what she saw as crypto-reductionism.*  While her examples were specific projects in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, she tried to connect her criticism to the broader project of reductionism in the philosophy of science, and when I questioned her after the talk about which philosophers advocated the views she was describing (since I sincerely couldn't think of any; even philosophers like myself who call themselves reductionists have a very different idea of reduction than that she attributes to the scientists she criticizes), she made a reference to the "whole unity of science movement" as an example of these ideas being widespread in philosophy.  I found this unsatisfying, as the unity of science crowd were precisely the people who seemed to me to not have been making or encouraging any of the mistakes she criticized in her particular examples.

I still find her case that philosophers are sources of some of the bad philosophical ideas she criticizes dubious.  In my reading of evolutionary psychology I saw little evidence of the influence of any work in the philosophy of science (sadly, there was philosophical content, but it was blissfully uninformed by any work by philosophers, as I mentioned when I talked about Palmer and Thornhill on causation).  I'm sure I could have made the point much more sharply if I'd had more examples of my own of the sort of bad science she wanted to criticize, and to which her pluralism was supposed to be an alternative.  So I wish I'd read the evolutionary psychology material before her talk.  Perhaps I'll see her again.  Or, better yet, perhaps I should look up some of her papers and write up a paper of my own discussing these issues.

* Not her word, but it seems an appropriate one for people who constantly talk about complicated interplay between genes and developmental and environmental factors, and then provide explanations which are entirely or nearly entirely based on genes alone.

Comments

[Bob Bernstein]

Surely Longino was not referring to the 'unity of science' movement that began to evaporate with the advent of the second world war, and then expired along with Neurath in 1945?