Neurath's Boat

Reductionism and History

For some reason I've been doing a bit of tilting at windmills, posting comments to a couple of discussions of biblical history here.  Really, it is hard to know where to begin with people who have such strange standards of evidence.  In the present instance, of course, there is also their apparent blindness to how non-standard their treatment of ancient source material is, and to how differently they treat pro-Christian vs. other sources.

Of course, there may be an element of deceit, or at least indifference to truth; I admit I find it very hard to resist such suspicion in the case of Lydia McGrew.  But there are less extreme and more respectable biblical scholars who nonetheless share unusual standards of evidence.  Thus, I think it's worthwhile to ask why such unusual standards of evidence are inappropriate.

Obviously, the argument cannot be any appeal to authority, and in the present context any very direct appeal to the success of more orthodox historical standards is likely to be little more than that, as our main measure of success in investigating history is producing results acceptable to orthodox historians.  Nor is it the case that the advantages of one kind of approach to evidence over another are obvious in this area.  There is certainly no canonical list of acceptable evidence and appropriate evidence weights to consult to decide such issues; indeed, discovering new kinds of evidence and new ways of looking at things is one of the most important engines of intellectual progress.

I think the analogy of science is instructive.  Kuhn is especially famous for having noted the evolving nature of standards and evidence in science; a Kuhnian paradigm is so-called because it centrally involves paradigm cases of observation and measurement, paradigms of evidence gathering and evaluation.  If Kuhn were right in the extreme claims he sometimes made that choice of paradigms was subjective, irrational, and independent of evidence, then it would be hard to criticize the biblical historians for adopting the approaches they do.  But Kuhn was not right about that.  Though the standards for evaluating paradigms are different from the standards of evidence evaluation internal to paradigms, they are not automatically irrational.

One of the most important such standards is fit with other successful theories.  It is for this reason that I am an advocate of reductionism and unity of science ideals generally; reductionism is a quest to find the logical relations between theories, so that inconsistencies can be exposed, since inconsistencies show, as always, that there are problems somewhere.

This is a basic problem for the paradigm employed by those like McGrew; one of the more easily described features of the paradigm is that reports of miracles in ancient sources are regarded as comparable to other kinds of reports in ancient sources.  A paradigm which treats those different kinds of reports as equivalent does not fit with our scientific theories (a point made by Hume, of course).  Thus, the standard paradigms employed by mainstream ancient historians, paradigms which give no weight to the possibility that miraculous reports are accurate (and for that matter lower than usual credence to the possibility that they are distortions of actual events and higher than usual credence to the possibility that what they report has no similarity to anything that actually happened) are better than the paradigm employed by McGrew.

I am not entirely certain what her view of these matters is.  Sometimes she writes as if she thinks it's an unreasonable bias to expect historical claims to be scientifically plausible.  It is hard to know how to respond to that.  Oddly, she and her allies do sometimes write as if theological soundness is relevant to evaluating historical claims; this seems to be a recognition that fit with external theories is important, though of course theological paradigms do not fit well with successful scientific theories either (nor do they show any of the other usual marks of successful paradigms).  But sometimes she writes as if she thinks she's just using obvious standards, or as if she's using the same standards as ancient historians use generally.  If that is truly what she believes, it is again not easy to know how to respond to such an extraordinary view.

How important was Darwin to philosophy?

Evolutionary theory makes it impossible for biological species to be natural kinds (or at the very least, if naturalness comes in degrees, they're very marginal natural kinds).  Biological species were, for Aristotle, a central example of forms.  Even if there is a good way to make sense of forms of some kind, evolutionary theory again, for the same reasons, makes it clear that there can't be forms corresponding to biological species.

This seems to have profound consequences for many of the hopes of rationalism; many earlier attempts to provide rationalist accounts of human nature seem to have been heavily dependent on there being a form of humanity (and even self-proclaimed critics of rationalism like Kant often make claims which seem to require something very much like such a form).  This is especially clear in the case of ethics.  On the Aristotelian, form-centered view of human nature, variations in humanity are deviations from the basic form.  This made it at least conceivable that undesirable features of humanity could be explained away as merely deviations (if in some cases depressingly frequent ones), leaving open the possibility that the form could serve a normative purpose, that one could derive what humans ought to do from the form of humanity.[1]

Undercutting this is a major change.  On the other hand, Newtonian physics already seems to carve up the world along lines very different from those suggested by Aristotle's forms, and as a result skepticism about viewing any aspect of the world in terms of forms was already well established long before Darwin.  Certainly there were many critics of Aristotelian natural-law morality before Darwin, including, for example, the whole empiricist tradition, which also rejected forms in general.

So, how much difference did the additional reasons Darwin provided for being skeptical of biological forms make?  And, conversely, did the rejection of forms in the British Empiricist tradition help in any way in making something like an evolutionary theory seem conceivable to Darwin and his contemporaries?

[1] While evolutionary theory does provide some ability to distinguish the normal from the abnormal (as discussed by Millikan), the lines are much murkier, and not revealed by reason, and prospects for plausibly lining up the evolutionarily normal with the morally good are far worse.

What counts as an explanation?

A much discussed subject in the philosophy of science.  I am curious as to whether medical researchers have a special meaning for it which is quite different from those employed in everyday life or philosophy, as otherwise this headline is highly misleading.  The article mentions (several paragraphs in) that the correlation between IQ and mortality rates may be the result of a common cause of both low IQ and high mortality, and cites the original study as saying this theory has "much to recommend" it (and given my knowledge of the other correlations so far discovered between SES, various health factors, and IQ, it seems obvious that the authors of the study are right to take that possibility very seriously).  But if that's the case, then it would have to be in some very special sense of "explain" that low IQ "explains" high mortality.

Evaluating scientific evidence

Thanks to overcoming bias, I was led to this amusing study.  A friend of mine went skydiving just a week ago; I wonder how she'll react to my informing her of the state of research into the health benefits of parachutes.

Getting at what's fundamental

I follow an interesting pro-Bayesian blog called "Overcoming Bias," which just recently had a post about reductionism. The post refers to the alleged fact that "there is only the most basic level - the elementary particles and fundamental forces." Now, I'm a great fan of reductionism (it has been some months since my dissertation was completed and accepted, but I haven't changed my mind about the central views I defend there yet). But the idea of a fundamental level is not necessary (or, I think, desirable) for a reductionist view. All of the benefits of reductionism come from accepting that there is only one world. The point of reductionism is to establish the unity of science, as some past advocates of reductionism have put it. But unity only requires that everything be linked to everything else, it doesn't require that there's some privileged foundation that all the connections flow through.

Insisting on a fundamental level saddles reductionism with unprovable metaphysics (as I ask in the comments thread, how do we know there is a basic level?) and also encourages misleading implications. The word "fundamental" sometimes means "most important," and those who make a big deal about the bottom level not infrequently seem to be misled into thinking that the bottom level (whatever they think it is) is fundamental in this sense as well, and not merely in the sense of just being the bottom.

PZ Myers stands up for philosophers!

Critics of intelligent design sometimes suggest that it ought to be discussed in philosophy classes rather than biology classes. A recent post at Pharyngula recognizes that intelligent design's total lack of intellectual content makes it of little more interest to philosophers than to biologists; it's so nice to see someone who isn't a philosopher recognize this point.

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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.

The science of A Natural History of Rape

There is a dramatic shift in Palmer and Thornhill's text, starting in chapter 3, and ending at the end of chapter 4.  This is the region of the book where the authors discuss the particular evidence they find most relevant to their theses about rape.  In this region of the book, they frequently mention issues which they think require more study, and make proposals for tests of their speculations.  Somewhat less frequently, but still notably (especially in contrast to the rest of their book), they mention data which seems to raise questions for their hypotheses.  The data that they mention in this portion of the book is certainly intriguing and suggestive, though it is quite unclear what exactly to conclude from it.

Since I had wanted not to hate the book, it having been recommended to me by someone I like and have some respect for, I felt very relieved when I started to get into chapter 3, and hoped the rest of the book would continue more in that tone.  This looked like science; sure, they were engaging in speculations, and their evidence was far from conclusive, but the phenomena of human behavior are extremely complex.  Making speculative claims and proposing further tests seems an entirely appropriate procedure.  Unfortunately, there are reasons to worry even about this part of the book.

I will not comment in detail about the quality of the data that Palmer and Thornhill present; I am not by any means an expert in their field.  Evolution, Gender, and Rape contains much discussion of their evidence by those with more knowledge of the field.  I found the essays in that volume of uneven quality, but some were quite good, and they often cited fascinating evidence and speculations of their own.  Some of the essays also raised serious questions about Palmer and Thornhill's methods of analyzing their data, which surely need to be examined; such issues represent the first problem with the more scientific part of Palmer and Thornhill's text.

The second problem is that it ends so quickly.  It constitutes roughly a quarter of the book, with the remaining 3/4 devoted to virulent and sometimes dishonest polemic against feminist social psychologists, as well as some very bad philosophy of science.

An obvious speculation is that they did not, in fact, have enough material to make a substantial book, and padded it out with deliberate attempts to provoke controversy (if this was their goal, they certainly succeeded).  The next question for my investigation of bias and methodology is whether the flaws in the science section show any sort of pattern, such that Palmer and Thornhill's motivations might have affected that part of the book as well; this question will require far more thorough investigation than I have so far done, so I probably won't be posting any more about this particular book for some time.  Which will probably be a relief to many.

Evolutionary explanations

So, evolutionary psychology is frequently criticized as reductionist, and many of its critics complain about the employment of evolutionary accounts for human social behavior.  In my dissertation, presently going through final revisions, I argue in favor of reductionism, and I extensively and usually approvingly cite Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, which advances an evolutionary account of thought and language.  So it seems that I ought to be predisposed in favor of evolutionary psychology.  For that matter, when I was studying at UCSB, I did one year have a roommate who was an evolutionary psychology grad student, and he was a nice enough guy.  However, I'm not actually finding myself all that impressed so far.

I'll explain one important difference between Millikan and the evolutionary psychologists I've read so far.  Millikan recognizes that there are many ways in which things can be reproduced, and central to her view is the point that selection can operate on things which are reproduced by any means.  So, for example, tools can easily be seen as produced via a complicated evolutionary process; in modern times, people buy tools because they perform various functions more or less well, and tools are manufactured because people are willing to buy them.  Tools that perform their function better sell better, so when manufacturers come up with a new and better tool, they start producing copies of that instead, driving the old, less good tool out of the market.  Tools obviously don't have genes, though they have a variety of constraints; a tool which performs better but requires much more expensive materials will not be selected for, and a tool may gain an advantage in the marketplace because machines specialized for more quickly and efficiently manufacturing that tool are already available, and alternate designs which couldn't be built using the same machines may be at a disadvantage despite performing their functions better.  And there are endless further complications (for example, legal issues or aesthetic issues may affect which tools can be sold and which are preferred by buyers; a particular tool's manufacturer may have deals with certain efficient distributors which give the tool advantages over tools made by other manufacturers independent of the merits of the tool).

Millikan thinks we should interpret beliefs on a similar pattern; we have evolved some machinery for generating beliefs, and one of the mechanisms of belief formation involves the ability to transfer beliefs to others and acquire beliefs by transfer from others through communication (indeed, Millikan thinks communicability is one of the criteria distinguishing beliefs from other kinds of states, though communicability with one's future self via memory may be sufficient for something to be belief-like, so animals are not necessarily excluded from having any beliefs whatever).  Selection pressures obviously function on the beliefs, and the exact details of the mechanisms surely play a big role in how easily various kinds of beliefs are developed and transferred, but there are plenty of other selection pressures.*

For example, and this is critical for one of my big worries about the evolutionary psychologists I've read, if a particular belief often leads to a quick death, its ability to spread to others is greatly reduced, as its advocates will have little time to pass it on.  Further, it is highly likely that observing the tendency of a belief to lead to death will produce a certain resistance to the acceptance of that belief, even if the exact psychological mechanisms by which people accept or reject beliefs presented to them in communication are not fully understood.  Thus, it is to be expected that beliefs which lead to swift death would be rare due to selection pressures on beliefs.  Beliefs which lead to swift death might also be rare due to selection patterns on belief-forming mechanisms; a belief-forming mechanism which can never form a rapidly self-destructive belief seems to have some advantage, and so it is possible that people should have genes which code for belief-forming mechanisms hostile to a particular self-destructive belief.  However, the fact that the self-destructive belief faces powerful selection pressures anyway means that the difference between having such genes and not having such genes is small (even those without genes specifically hostile to a particular self-destructive belief are unlikely to develop that belief because of the general features of belief formation and the selection pressures on beliefs, so those without the genes are at only a very slight, perhaps negligible, disadvantage).

Thus, it is an empirical question where the forces of selection have exerted the most influence in bringing about a particular behavior; selection pressures don't have to work on genes.  They certainly don't in the case of tools, which don't have genes, and beliefs undergo sufficiently rapid change that it is implausible that genetic changes could account for changes in belief frequencies.  Indeed, behavior in general is quite variable between times and cultures, in ways which seem plausibly responsive to selection pressures, but which change too quickly for the selection pressures to have operated on genes.

However, note that while great variability does tend to rule out the possibility of gene selection, less variability does not necessarily show gene selection; if selection forces are particularly strong, then a behavior transmitted through explicit instruction or imitation would be expected to be very persistent and to spread quickly and thoroughly, and if such a behavior first appeared sufficiently far in the past, it would not be surprising for the behavior to be universally or nearly universally taught and imitated by humans everywhere.

Evolutionary psychologists all, to varying degrees, concede that behavior results from a complex interplay of genes and environment, but it appears that in practice they focus almost all of their attention on genes.  So far, I have not been able to dig up much evidence in favor of this procedure.  Admittedly, we are presumably interested in all of the causes of human behavior, so evaluating selection for genes which influence behavior is certainly an interesting and worthy research project.  However, in some evolutionary psychology writings (such as A Natural History of Rape, the example I'm currently investigating), the evolutionary psychologists insist that genes are the most important factor, and that concentrating on other factors invariably leads to worthless results.  This does not appear to be the case, even on the basis of the arguments they themselves present.

* There are obviously connections between Millikan's account and the trendy notion of "memes," first proposed by Dawkins somewhat earlier than Millikan's book.  Millikan's account is much more detailed than most discussions of meme theory, and to my knowledge she has never adopted the meme terminology, but she is clearly in sympathy with the views of Daniel Dennett (and vice versa), and Dennett has recently jumped on the meme bandwagon.  I've avoided it because of the misleading implication of atomism, though arguably "gene," on which the term is based, is equally misunderstood when interpreted atomistically, so perhaps the lesson is that people should be wary of atomism rather than of a particular terminology.

Evolutionary psychology

"...Just what do they want?  You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world into the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man's intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid) -- what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time?  Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle man, which is perhaps unacknowledged?  Or perhaps a pessemistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green?  Or a certain subterranean animosity and racune toward Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness?  Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life?  Or finally -- a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper? -- But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round humans and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp.  I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do not believe it; and if it is permitted to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope the reverse is true, -- that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth -- because there are such truths."

I have a friend who's an evolutionary psychologist, and naturally I often make fun of her for it.  However, since I am interested in philosophy of science, and have long thought I'd like to do some work on the interactions of bias and methodology in the social sciences, I've started looking in detail at some evolutionary psychology, starting with books she's recommended.  The first I read was A Natural History of Rape, since controversial topics are certain to at least have accusations of bias flying around.   I must admit to having more than a little suspicion that it will turn out to be a fact about the evolutionary psychologists, as with the English psychologists Nietzsche talks about in my quote, "that historical spirit itself is lacking in them."  (Surely those quotes are appropriate, as one of Nietzsche's targets was the famous early blender of psychology and evolutionary biology, Herbert Spencer).  I don't feel quite ready yet to post any definite conclusions, but I certainly will be posting more about a positivist revivalist's perspective on evolutionary psychology shortly.