Griffiths on Human Nature, report 14 Aug 2009 I see that Michael Fridman at a Nadder! has given a short rundown of Paul Griffiths’ lecture on Human Nature. I feel very guilty not to have done my own account. I have been trying to get my motorcycle registered, and it wasn’t that easy in New South Wales… So here are some reflections. I’ve heard Paul and his collaborators Karola Stotz, Ed Machery and Stefan Linquist on this topic for ages. It was sort of a background thing – yeah, that’s what Paul and those guys are working on, an experimental philosophy project on “innateness” [PDF of forthcoming article]. And I had read his papers and reports, too. But it didn’t all come together until this talk. Paul thinks that people have a folk biological notion of what it is for something to be “innate” or “natural” for organisms. That is, there is a “default opinion” (my name, not his) that people more or less automatically adopt. He thinks that they slide between three distinct issues: the fixity of a trait (it’s very hard to change, like teaching your dog to walk on two legs, not four), the typicality of a trait (most or all members of the species or kind have it), and the teleology of the trait (it is adaptive or functional). People identify one of these and immediately infer the others. That is what “innate” means. Now this is something that he has done some surveys on, of both biologists and “ordinary folk” (i.e., western first year university students, a well-studied tribe), and gotten considerable success with. But biologists are adopting what has come to be known as the “interactionist consensus” (a term from Paul’s and Kim Sterelny’s book Sex and Death): a trait, including behavioural traits, is the interaction of three things: genetic inheritance, ecological resources, and the resources passed on from your parents (including your cytological inheritance, and epigenetic inheritance, a term that has a narrow and a wide interpretation). So on this account, the folk biological account of a “nature-nurture” divide fails, and with it the notion of innateness, and of course all the ideas like “instinct” that depend upon it. Nothing is what it is except by an interaction between these factors, and that includes the ecological resources constructed by the organisms themselves. Paul took this a lot further, of course, and I will continue to ruminate and report, but one thing that struck me was his comment that this is the “default” view (it’s not, though, innate, just typical). I suspect that this is not entirely the case. Most of the work done on child development and essentialism (such as Susan Gelman’s The Essential Child reports) has been done, of necessity, in western environments, and while some of it must be generalisable, not all of it is, given how acculturated even young children are. Moreover, I suspect also that the “folk biology” is not so unadulterated by cultural history as Paul suggested. Aristotelian ideas, along with other traditions like Platonism/Gnosticism/Alchemy and so on have left a lot of ideas in popular culture. Even scientists carry them along sometimes. But none of that affects Paul’s study anyway; whether it is an inbuilt disposition to make these inferences or culturally modified doesn’t change the fact this is how people think, at least round these parts. The implications of this are fairly broad and significant. Much of our political and ethical discourse is founded on the essentialist notion of innateness. People think that genes determine what we are and what we can do about it is limited. But experience, even on fairly simple genetic disorders like phenylketonuria, shows us this is wrong. And it is very unlikely that behavioural traits have simple genetic factors underlying them, even if the interactionist view were wrong. Read the paper I linked to above for more. Biology Evolution Genetics Philosophy Race and politics Science Social evolution Species and systematics
Genetics Update: Genetic information paper 22 Jan 2010 I have updated my paper on deflating genetic information. The new version is here. Details: A deflation of genetic information ABSTRACT: It is often claimed there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Genetic “information” refers to distinct notions, either of concrete properties of molecular… Read More
Epistemology Some of my recent papers and reviews 28 May 2010 “What is a species? Essences and Generation” forthcoming in Theory in Biosciences. Review of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin for RNCSE. Secularism essay in which I argue that secularism protects religions. A shorter version of the Milvian Bridge essay, with Paul Griffiths Read More
Book Scientist’s Operating Manual – Evidence; gathering, measuring, analysing 7 Oct 2010 In this chapter we will look at how science gathers information about the world, and what it does with it. [Contributors should write their bits in the comments, and I will collate them below the fold or in new posts. By the way, contributors will be named unless they don’t… Read More
Interesting about the idea of folk innateness being a “default” notion — it’s almost a paper about an “innate idea about innateness”. In my post I couldn’t describe it any other way without using the word “natural”, which suggests that this concept runs very deep indeed. I agree it would be interesting to see intuitions from other cultural contexts. In the talk, Paul said he believes results would be the same for non-western-uni-students but it might not be the case. A lot of the expositions of Aristotle I heard have him systemising “common sense” or the “folk sciences”. So if the paper is right, this would be true, if not then Aristotle might have imposed a new paradigm on an existing folk science that was different (or less systematic) PS. I don’t see a link to the PDF paper in the post
The link is “innateness”. Paul was asked about that, and said that one can still have hard to shift species-typical behavioural dispositions, and that has to be true. I am to an extent with you: I think that “natural” is pretty good, once you shear it of the connotations that are folk biological. Aristotle systematised something – I suspect it was the cultural vector of Greek science interacting with the ordinary species psychological dispositions of human beings. In a particular ecology 🙂
Exciting research. Need to spend some time translating it into a familiar language and reading some of the refrence material before kicking the ideas about with written and oral source material. I think it’s accurate to suggest that folk biology is indeed influenced by cultural history. But that just makes things more intresting.
I am uncertain of one of the core features disscussed. That the development of species typical traits does not depend on enviromental influences. The example given is to imagine the traits a cow would have raised by a family of pigs. Ask what traits a human would have if raised by a family of wolfs, the answer I suspect may be diffrent and very clearly has been in the past. I think the myths of wild children are cultural imposed and the diffrences you get according to social position with this belief would appear to reflect that. But it still appears to make a diffrence.
I suppose you would ask the question of feral children, are they bipedal if raised by animals, a subject of debate at one point in time. Werewolf’s (transformation due to melancholia) wild -men (transformation due to grief and shame in Celtic realms and mute). The 6th century Conrechta (Lit con= dog/wolf, recht= reason/human) that I would translate as the wolf who speaks with a human voice and named as part of a trinity alongside the confeal (howling one) and the good wife saved by the fairies (mute due to her ordeal). The Celtic creatures in particular seem to play with the standard classical definition of humanity and suggest a degree of fluidity. The return to (an essential?) reasonable human form and redemption is always possible but never certain in many of these stories. The intention of telling such tales was partly I suspect to provoke debate. Although perhaps they refer to the classical origin and (essence?) of humanity as “mutum et turpe pecus” (dumb, shapeless, unsightly, shameful, cattle/of the lower orders) They don’t seem to make for an easy fit, although I can think of a number of examples, which do.