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Science and Human Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2012

Richard Samuels
Richard Samuels
Affiliation:
The Ohio State Universitysamuels.58@osu.edu
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Extract

There is a puzzling tension in contemporary scientific attitudes towards human nature. On the one hand, evolutionary biologists correctly maintain that the traditional essentialist conception of human nature is untenable; and moreover that this is obviously so in the light of quite general and exceedingly well-known evolutionary considerations. On this view, talk of human nature is just an expression of pre-Darwinian superstition. On the other hand, talk of human nature abounds in certain regions of the sciences, especially in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. Further, it is very frequently most common amongst those cognitive-behavioral scientists who should be most familiar with the sorts of facts that putatively undermine the very notion of human nature: sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and more generally, theorists working on the evolution of mind and culture.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 70 , July 2012 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2012

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References

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3 See, for example, Wilson, E.O., On Human Nature (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L., ‘On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation’, Journal of Personality, 58 (1990) 17–67Google Scholar; and Pinker, S., The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. (New York: Viking, 2002)Google Scholar.

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5 Though human nature has often been expected to play a central role in moral theory, I will discuss this here. The main reason for this is that I am concerned with the status of human nature in the sciences; and in such contexts, little or no moral work is expected of human nature.

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7 Op. cit. note 4.

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9 Op. cit. note 8.

10 Two points are in order. First, the precise modal status of such impossibility claims is unclear – e.g. whether they are supposed to be expressions of nomological, metaphysical or logical impossibility. Second, however else the claim is intended, it is clearly distinct from the idea that human nature is definitional of being human. The mere fact that one's membership of a kind is defined by one's nature does not imply that one's nature is hard to change. It just means that if one's nature changes, then so too does one's kind membership (and vice versa).

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13 Of course, there are a huge number of characteristics that are unique to humans that no-one thinks are aspects of human nature because they are socio-historically local. Playing for the Dallas Cowboys, scoring an 800 on one's GRE's, or having a fondness for cooking Chateau Briand are characteristics of this sort.

14 This idea was suggested in discussion with Paul Griffiths.

15 Recently Griffiths has stressed the importance of regularities that do not concern similarities between conspecifics but reliably occurring differences – e.g. sexual dimorphisms, and systematic behavioral or morphological variation that is a function of, say, climate. Though I see no serious problem with accommodating such regularities into an account of human nature, for the sake of simplicity, I will not to focus on them here.

16 Imagine an atom-for-atom duplicate of President Obama that inhabits a planet far, far away. If species essentialism were true, then this Twin Obama must be a human being since it is intrinsically indistinguishable from Obama. Moreover, this would be so even if Twin Obama were entirely genealogically unrelated to Obama and other humans.

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25 The Muller-Lyer illusion illustrates this point. Though widely assumed to result from species-typical perceptual biases, it is in fact quite sensitive to developmental- environmental conditions. For discussion see McCauley, R. and Henrich, J., ‘Susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer Illusion, Theory-Neutral Observation, and the Diachronic Penetrability of the Visual Input System’ Philosophical Psychology 19 (1) (2006) 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Op. cit. note 20, 323.

27 ‘Virtues of the Nomological Notion of Human Nature’ presented at The International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, Utah 2011.

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30 Some maintain that this causal conception of essences and not the taxonomic one is the more traditional. For example, Walsh (2006) argues that Aristotle has a causal conception of essences was a causal as opposed to taxonomic one. I do not propose to dispute the issue here.

31 As I use the terms, all taxonomic essences are causal essences but not vice versa. For in addition to figuring in causal explanations, a taxonomic essence is, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, possessed by all and only the member of the kind. In contrast, causal essences need not even be possessed by all members of the kind, let alone be individuative of the kind. They may, for example, be lacking in deviant, abnormal or borderline members of the kind. In terms of the essentialist commitments outlined in section 2.1, the point may be put as follows: Taxonomic essences must satisfy conditions E2 and E4, whilst causal essences need only satisfy E4.

32 For more extensive characterizations of the homeostatic cluster view see: Boyd, R. ‘What Realism Implies and What It Does Not’, Dialectica 43 (1990) 5–29Google Scholar; Boyd, R., ‘Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds’, Philosophical Studies 61 (1991) 127–148Google Scholar; and Boyd, R. ‘Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa’. In Wilson, R. (ed.) Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999, 141–186)Google Scholar.

33 This is, of course, a longstanding issue in the philosophy of psychology. See Segal, Gabriel, A Slim Book about Narrow Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

34 Hume, DavidEnquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Selby-Bigge, L. A., 3rd edition revised by P. H. Nidditch. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference at Oxford Brookes, Washington University, the University of Pittsburgh and the ISHPSSB conference held at the University of Utah. I am grateful for the many helpful suggestions that were offered on these occasions. Special thanks are due to Mark Cain, John Doris, John Dupre, Steve Downes, Frederick Eberhardt, Hans-Johann Glock, Paul Griffiths, Maria Kronfeldner, Sandy Mitchell, P.D. Magnus, Gillian Russell, Constantine Sandis, Roy Sorensen, Kim Sterelny and Karola Stotz. I would also like to thank Tim Schroeder, Eduoard Machery, P.D. Magnus, and Carl Craver for stimulating discussions of the issues covered in this paper.