Final Exam Prep

[4a] P. Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam (1958), "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol, 2, only p. 3-9, 16-29. Key pages: 7-9

[4b] N. Maull (1977), "Unifying Science Without Reduction", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8, p. 143-162. Key pages: 142-144, 148, 154-55, 159-60.

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[5a] E.O. Wilson (1980), Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition, only p. 3-6, 271-278, 284-287, 290-301. Key pages: 3, 299-301

[5b] M. Sahlins (1976), The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology, only p. ix-28, 56-67. Key pages: 10-11, 17-18 23-24. 64-65.

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[6a] M. Hunt (2007), The Story of Psychology, Revised Edition, only p. 274-298, 311-317 ("The Behaviorists"). Key Pages: 275-277, 289-291, 295-296.

[6b] M. Hunt (2007), The Story of Psychology, Revised Edition, only p. 459-470, 476-485, 488-490, 497-504 ("The Social Psychologists"). Key pages: 459-460, 264, 500-504

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[7a] W. Dray (1993), Philosophy of History, Second Edition, only p. 1-20 ("Introduction" and "Explanation and Understanding"). Key pages: 1,4,5,9,10,12,13,16

[7b] M. Lemon (2003), Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, only p. 238-247, 261-267, 271-273 ("Marx on History"). Key pages- 240, 271-273.

[8] F. Copleston (1956), A History of Philosophy, Vol. 11, Logical Positivism and Existentialism, only p. 125-147, 201-209 ("Existentialism"). Key Pages: 125, 201

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Terms in this set (8)

[4a] P. Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam (1958), "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol, 2, only p. 3-9, 16-29. Key pages: 7-9

What's the aim of the paper? To formulate a precise concept of Unity of Science, and to examine to what extent that unity can be attained.

- Unity of science in a weaker sense is about using one terminology: Unity of language. All terms of science get reduced to the terms of a certain discipline.
- Unity of science in the stronger sense (because it merely implies the unity of language, not the focus) is represented by the Unity of Laws. Laws of science get reduced to the laws of some one discipline. The exact meaning of "unity of laws" depends on how the concept of "reduction" is employed.
- Unity of science in the strongest sense is realized if the laws of science are not only reduced to the laws of some one discipline, but the laws of the discipline are in some intuitive sense "unified" or "connected".

- Unity of science in the article will be used in two senses; the ideal state of science and how to attain that ideal. The first sense is about the unity of language and unity of laws (unity of explanatory principles). In the second sense, the unity of science is about an existing trend within the scientific inquiry, whether or not unitary science is ever attained.

Unity of Science and Micro Reduction:

The principle requirements may be summarized as follows: given two theories T1 and T2, T2 is said to be reduced to T1 if and only if:
1) The vocab of T2 contains terms not in the vocab of T1.
2) Any observational data explainable by T2 are explainable by T1.
3) T1 is at least as well systematized as T2. (T1 is normally mroe complicated that T2; but this is allowable, because the reducing theory (biology for example) normally explains more than the reduced theory (psychology for example).

What is the essential feature of micro-reduction is that the branch B1 deals with the parts of the objects dealt with by B2. We must suppose that corresponding to each branch we have a specific universe of discourse UB1; and that we have a part-whole relation, Pt. Under the following conditions we shall say that the reduction of B2 to B1 is a micro-reduction; B2 is reduced to B1; and the objects in the universe of discourse of B2 are wholes whiich possses a decomposition into proper parts all of which belong to the universe of discourse of B1.

We shall also say that branch B1 is a potential micro-reducer of a branch B2 if the objects in the universe of discourse of B2 are wholes which posses a decomposition into proper parts all of which belong to the universe of discourse of B1. Same defintion to mirco-reduces except for the omission of the clause "B2 is reduced to B1".

Any micro-reduction constitutes a step in the direction of Unity of Language in science. For it, if B1 reduces B2, it explains everything that B2 does (and normally more besides).

Not every reduction moves in the direction of Unity of Science btw. However, micro-reductions and partial micro-reductions allow us to replace some of the terms of one branch of science by terms of another branch of science, and this moves in the direction of Unity of Science.

Likewise, the micro-reduction of B2 to B1 moves in the direction of Unity of Laws; for it reduces the total numebr of scientific laws by making it possible, in princple, to dispense with the laws of B2 and explain the relevent observations by B1.

The relations "micro-reduces" and "potential micro-reducer" have very simple properties:
1) They are transitive (this follows from the transitivity of the relations "reduces" and "Pt").
2) They are irreflexive (no branch can micro-reduces itself)
3) They are asymmetric (if B1 micro-reduces B2, B2 never micro-reduces B1)

The last two properties (not purely formal) still require the empirical assumption that there does not exist an infinite descending chain of proper parts (for example, a series of things x1, x2, x3 .... such that x2 is a proper part of x1, x3 is a proper part of x2 etc).

The just-mentioned formal property (property 1) of the relations "micro-reduces" - it's transitivity - is of great importance for the program of Unity of Science. It means that micro-reductions have a cumulative character. That is, if a branch B3 is micro-reduced to B2, in turn, B2 is micro-reduced to B1; then B3 is automatically micro-reduced to B1.

They argue that psychological laws can be reduced to laws of atomic physics, in princple, But it would nevertheless be hopelessly impractical to try derive the behaviour of a single human being directly from his constitution in terms of elementary particles.

Unitary Science does not exist today but will it ever be attained?
1) if Unitary science can be attained at all, how can it be attained?
2) Can it be attained at all?

First question related: There are many cases in which the reducing theory and the reduced theory belong to the same branch or to branches with the same universe of discourse. When we come however to branches with different universes like psycholgoy and phyiscs, then it seems clear that the possiblity of reduction depends on the existience of a structural connection between the universes via the "Pt" relation. Thus, one supposes that psychology may be reducible to phyiscs but not that phyiscs may be reducible to psychology. Thus the only method of attaining unitary science that appears to be seriously avaliable at present is micro-reduction.

Second Question related: They think the assumption that unitary science can be attained through cumulative micro-reductions recommends itself as a working hypothesis. Further progress can be attained in this direction without claiming that its truth has been established.

They ordered branches in a way to indicate the major potential micro-reducers - they did this by ordering them according to their universe of discourses. Thus they reached their own reductive levels system. This system is so chosen that a branch with the things of a given level as its universe of discourse will always be a potential micro-reducer of any branch with the things of the next higher level (if there is one) at its universe of discourse.

Reductive System Levels Rules:

1) There must be several levels
2) The number of levels must be finite.
3) There must be a unique lowest level (leading ultimately to a reduction to a single branch).
4) Any thing of any level except the lowest must posses a decomposition into thing beloning to the next lower level. Each level will be as it were a "common denominator" for the level immediately above it.
5) Nothing on any level should have a part on any higher level.
6) The levels must be selected in a way which is "natural" and justifiable from the standpoint of present-day empirical science.

Level 6 >>>>> Social groups
Level 5 >>>>> (Multicellular) living things
Level 4 >>>>> Cells
Level 3 >>>>> Molecules
Level 2 >>>>> Atoms
Level 1 >>>>> Elementary particles

Each level includes all higher levels. The higher level to which a thing belongs will be considered the "proper" level of that thing.

Completed

[4b] N. Maull (1977), "Unifying Science Without Reduction", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8, p. 143-162. Key pages: 142-144, 148, 154-55, 159-60.

The decisive discoveries about the relationship between the "biological" and the "physico-chemical" came about as the result of developments in different branches of science, for example, in genetics, biochemistry and physical chemistry. Yet none of these areas of investigation developed "autonomously", that is to say, unaffected by neighboring fields of research. Rather, each of these branches of science has, as part of its own evolution, generated important conceptual, theoretical and problem-solving links with other branches. Indeed, and this is my main point, the very genesis of links between different areas of investigation is an important
though neglected type of scientific change.

Such processes of linkage, in fact, contribute to a gradual "unification" between biological and physical sciences. Until quite recently, of course, a widespread methodological commitment to the logical "unity of science" has led philosophers to ignore the historical processes through which such "unification" takes place. This paper, in contrast, focuses on precisely these processes. It is thereby meant as a contribution to the genetic and developmental reinterpretation of the "unity" ofscience.

Philosophers anticipating a logical unity among sciences commonly interpreted reduction as the deductive-nomological explanation of one theory by another theory. Yet the approach called derivational reduction leaves unanswered - not to say unasked - many important questions about (1) interactions between branches of science. (2) intermediate or linking theories and (3) the way the "unity" of science comes about.

Three important questions Maull asks:

1) What differences, fi any, are to be found between theories and branches
of research? Recall that derivational reduction is explicitly conceived as an
intertheoretic relation. But can interactions between branches of science be
adequately reconstructed as intertheoretic relations?

2) How can we understand the generation and function of hypotheses
that join theories or branches of research? Almost all derivational reductions, as we shall see, require "connections" between the terms of the reduced and the reducing theories. Connections between terms, however, are not established by virtue of the meanings of those terms. Rather, connections are discovered in processes of research; they are hypotheses. But under what circumstances are such linking hypotheses generated? And what relation do these hypotheses bear to the parts of science that they connect?

3) Finally, what do the fairly recent changes in the relationship between the
biological and the physical sciences tell us about their unification? The
derivational reduction model misleadingly identifies the unity of science with the cumulative reduction of theories, established "in principle" if not in fact. But what relation does such an account bear to the historical development and goals of science?

Maull here is gonna expose the limitations of the derivational reduction model when it comes to the goal of science unificaiton.

In Section 1 I explain why reductionists have never been able to deal intelligently with such questions. And in the subsequent two sections on descriptive levels and problem shifts, I propose a general answer based on my own historical investigations of the relationship between the biological and physical sciences. This alternative to derivational reduction begins by drawing attention to the way a vocabulary can be "shared" by different areas of research. Such a "shared" vacabulary, ti turns out, can be used to identify a very special sort of problem, a problem that, although it arises within one branch of inquiry, can only be solved with the aid of another science.

As I shall argue, this type of "shared problem" is solved by a theory, but NOT by a reduction of theories. Thus, in the final two sections of the paper (on interlevel theories and on the unification of science) I return to the failure of reduction, using that failure to explain the relevance of my own approach for answering the pivotal question: What kind of unity can reasonably be attributed to the development of science itself?

Descriptive Levels:

The development of an alternative to derivational reduction can begin, I think, with the observation that many important developments, especially in modern biology, have involved interactions not between two theories, but between two or more branches of science, or as I shall now call them (using the concept developed by Lindley Darden) fields. Examples of fields between which important interactions occur are ecology and population genetics, cytology and transmission genetics, transmission genetics and biochemistry, and biochemistry and physical chemistry. It is the last two of these pairs that I shall discuss.

But we do speak, rather naturally, of genetics, biochemistry and physical chemistry as fields (or as sciences, disciplines, areas of research, and so forth), and not as theories.

Maull empahsis the difference of theory and a field. To speak of a theory of genetics, for example, suggests the possibility of competitor theories. But we do not think of fields as competing, at least not in the sense that theories compete. Pushing further understanding of the elementary difference between a theory and a field, we can begin to develop an alternative to the reductionist account of the relation between biological and phyiscal sciences.

A field can be specified by reference to a focal problem, a domain
consisting of "facts" related to that problem, explanatory goals providing
expectations as to how the problem is to be solved, special methods and
techniques, and sometimes, but not always, laws and theories. While classical or Mendelian genetics used gross character differences as traits (e.g. eye color), modern transmission genetics focuses on molecular differences (for example, differences in proteins). Modern transmission genetics (like its classical Mendelian predecessor) can be distinguished as a field which investigates the problem of gene differences (or differences in the hereditary determinants) using the technique of hybridization and the method of inferring the gene difference difference from observations of the distributio of trait in hybrid progeny.

Remember that one of the flaws I attributed to derivational reduction
accounts was a tendency to minimize the importance of connections between terms. Thus, the development of analytic tools for talking about connections, such as the notion of the proper terms of a field and (especially those terms proper to more than one field - the transformed proper terms), is certainly desirable. It could alow us to discuss connections without falling back into talk about the logical relations between theories or between theories and what they explain (e.g. "correspondence rules", "bridge laws").

Indeed, the transformation and importation of terms must be essential
features in any alternative program to that of derivational reduction. For the
reduction program, connection (and derivation) between theories is required: for an alternative analysis, connections between the special vocabularies of fields are required for the ordering of special vocabularies as descriptive levels. The possibility of ordering the special vocabularies depends on an asymmetry or "directionality" in importation and in transformation. There is a directionality in importation when, for example, terms are more otten imported from biochemistry to genetics than vice versa. Directionality is also characterstic of transformation, although the "direction" is precisely the contrary to that foundin importation; genetic terms are more commonly transformed into biochemical ones than vice versa.

The directionality of importation and transformation, moreover, can be used to order the special vocabularies as descriptive levels:

1) If a proper term is imported from special vocabulary B to special
vocabulary A, then a condition for B being a deeper descriptive level than A
is fulfilled.
2) If a proper term is transformed from A to B, then a condition for B
being a deeper descriptive level than A is fulfilled.
3) Conditions 1 and 2 will not order special vocabularies as descriptive
levels if there are more than a few terms in B which are transformed in A.
Jointly, these conditions define the binary relation *...is a deeper descriptive
level than.'.

Notice that descriptive levels are the ordered special vocabularies of fields.
Notice, too, that the problem of different levels of scientific inquiry is usually
approached as the problem of ordering phenomena. The ordering of phenomena might be undertaken by utilizing any number of criteria; for example, entities might be ordered according to their spatial dimensions. The application of criteria for ordering often results in structural levels, that is, in levels exhibiting part/whole relationships. Lower level entities are then parts of higher level wholes. For example, Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam have discussed six "reductive levels in elaborating a notion of the unity of science: social groups; (multicellular) living things; cells; molecules; atoms; and elementary particles.

Important: The point to be made here is that the descriptive levels which I have been discussing are not structural levels in this sense. Whatever fundamental relations are characteristic of descriptive levels, they are not part/whole orderings (just as they are not deductive hierarchies of generality). In fact, my way of characterizing descriptive levels of science is desirable precisely because the different domains of scientific fields cannot always be ordered according to part/whole relationships between their items. Oppenheim and Putnam say that we can assign a branch of science (which is to say, all its "accepted theories") to one and only one reductive level, on the assumption that the universe of discourse of the branch is uniquely assignable. However, the actual assignment of branches to levels is not always possible, and, in the end, Oppenheim's and Putnam's initial assumption is at fault.

If we were forced to assign genetics to a single reductive
level, we would certainly select Putnam's and Oppenheim's molecular level,
since, after all, genes are molecules. Indeed, the fact that genetics is emphatically not a molecular science should convince us of the final irrelevance of the "structural level" model for understanding the relations between genetics and its neighboring fields.

Some of the difficulty encountered ni assigning theories or fields to structural levels can be explained by appealing to the phenomena that underlie the transformation of proper terms; for the same parts and wholes are often investigated at different levels and designated differently at each level. The genes (cistrons) of genetics, for instance, are also the DNA sequences of biochemistry. Likewise, many of the entities and processes of interest to biochemistry and physical chemistry are the "same, even though they may be designated in different ways. In physical chemistry, the conformation of molecules is the focal problem for investigation while in biochemistry, function is the pivotal problem. Thus, the "same" wholes and parts are investigated in different fields according to distinct (though related) problems.

In a given domain, characteristic problems cannot be solved solely by the
determination of part/whole relationships. The determination of causal and
functional relationships is also required. The discovery and elaboration of
part/whole relations, ni other words, does not exhaust scientific investigation.
This helps explain why the branches of science-or rather their universes of
discourse - cannot be satisfactorily characterized in terms of different
structural levels. The special vocabulary associated with a given branch of
science is not a set of predicates uniquely assigned to a single structural level.

Of course, any discussion of the reduction of branches or fields of science
which (like Oppenheim'sand Putnam's) bears little resemblance to the historical processes of unification among these branches, is doomed at the outset. A more fruitful approach to the unification of science is promised by a study of problems and of the interaction between neighboring problem constellations.

Problem Shifts:

Between different scientific fields, then, a shared vocabulary often emerges. The sharing of vocabularies should interest philosophers, however, for it is
symptomatic of other fundamental relationships between fields of research,
relationships that will help us explain how a problem can shift from one
area of investigation to another.

The unificaiton of science:

I take the relations between the field of genetics and the field of biochemistry as exemplary for the kind of "unity" which can reasonably be attributed to science. Like biochemistry and physical chemistry, these fields are ordered descriptive levels. This ordering relation contrasts sharply with derivational reduction. First of all, the relata are not theories but fields (which, of course, may have associated theories but are certainly not resolvable into them).

Weakness of derivational reduction model:

1) Derivational reduction, as I have said, places a disproportionate emphasis on the relations between theories. Thus, reductionists often make the mistake of assuming that a postulated "reduction" of theories implies a corollary "reduction" or domains, areas of inquiry or fields. Often enough, such mistakes rest on the idea that every field has acomprehensive theory or even that a field is its comprehensive theory.

In fact, the comprehensive theory of biochemistry is surely quantum mechanics, a theory obviously shared with physics and chemistry proper. This sharing of a comprehensive theory, however, does nothing to jeopardize the distinctiveness of biochemistry as afield ofresearch. Thus, it is simply a confusion to conflate a theory (even a "comprehensive theory") with afield.

Furthermore, by successfully disentangling (and thus relating) the concepts
of theory and field, we can also begin to explore the role of interlevel theories in the gradual "unification" of science.

Recall that, until recently, the formal concept of reduction (derivational
reduction) was used to characterize quite dissimilar kinds ofscientific change. "Reduction talk" seems irrelevant for analyses which, like the one I
have tried to present, no longer rely on the "structural" features of sentences
or systems of sentences, but rather on developmental and functional features to pick out the significant units of scientific change.

Conclusion: As I have emphasized throughout this paper, these two alternative ways of approaching the unity of science lead to quite incongruous results:

- According to derivational reduction, as I have said, the reducing theory explains the reduced theory.
- According to the present analysis, in contrast, an interlevel
theory bridges two fields by establishing, explaining, and warranting the
connections between descriptive levels.

Historically, special vocabularies simply are not just theoretical vocabularies and thus the connections between the vocabularies of neighboring fields are far more intricate and extensive than those postulated by derivational reductionists. According to these old accounts (derivational reductionists), in fact, a distinction between theoretical and observational terms is accompanied bya requirement that all the theoretical terms ofthe theory to be reduced (and only these terms) be connected with those of the reducing theory. By contrast, our examination of the subtler working relationship between terms of neighboring fields shows that some terms are transformed in a new field. We have seen that transformed terms are embedded in interlevel theories. Further, we have seen that terms can be imported from one special vocabulary to another and that, in a similar fashion, theories and laws may be shared by fields.

In fact, the present analysis provides a new set of concepts for understanding the unity of science and its relation to scientific change.

What's the difference between interlevel theories and interfield theories?

But interlevel theories only constitute a subset of the interfield theories previously investigated by Darden and me. While an interfield theory, the more general type, can be said to explain connections between fields, an interlevel theory - explains the connections between fields ordered as descriptive levels.

While the generation of an interfield theory is associated with a shared problem, the genesis of an interlevel theory is associated with a problem-shift characteristic of fields ordered as descriptive levels.

Completed

[5a] E.O. Wilson (1980), Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition, only p. 3-6, 271-278, 284-287, 290-301. Key pages: 3, 299-301

The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions-hate, love, guilt, fear, and others--that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.

Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. The hypothalamic-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism.

In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. Each organism generated by sexual reproduction is a unique, accidental subset of all the genes constituting the species. Natural selection is the process whereby certain genes gain representation in the following generations superior to that of other genes located at the same chromosome positions.

Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA. More to the point, the hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.

In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species. One class of such devices promotes prolonged individual survival. Another promotes superior mating performance and care of the resulting offspring. As more complex social behaviour by the organism is added to the genes' techniques for replicating themselves, altruism becomes increasingly prevalent and eventually appears in exaggerated forms.

This brings us to the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism, which by definition reduces personal fitness, possibly evolve by natural selection? Answer: The answer is kinship: if the genes causing the altruism are shared by two organisms because of common descent, and if the altruistic act by one organism increases the joint contribution of these genes to the next generation, the propensity to altruism will spread through the gene pool. This occurs even though the altruist makes less of a solitary contribution to the gene pool as the price of its altruistic act.

The hypothalamic-limbic complex of a highly social species, such as man, "knows," or more precisely it has been programmed to perform as if it knows, that its underlying genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction, and altruism. Consequently, the centers of the complex tax the conscious mind with ambivalences whenever the organisms encounter stressful situations. Love joins hate; aggression, fear; expansiveness, withdrawal; and so on - in blends designed not to promote the happiness and survival of the individual, but to favor the maximum transmission of the controlling genes.

By current theory, genocide or genosorption strongly favoring the aggressor need take place only once every few generations to direct evolution. This alone could push truly altruistic genes to a high frequency within the bands (see Chapter 5). The turnover of tribes and chiefdoms estimated from atlases of early European and Mideastern history (for example, the atlas by McEvedy, 1967) suggests a sufficient magnitude of differential group fitness to have achieved this effect. Furthermore, it is to be expected that some isolated cultures will escape the process for generations at a time, in effect reverting temporarily to what ethnographers classify as a pacific state.

Multifactorial Systems:

Each of the foregoing mechanisms could conceivably stand alone as a sufficient prime mover of social evolution. But it is much more likely that they contributed jointly, in different strengths and with complex interaction effects. Hence the most realistic model may be fully cybernetic, with cause and effect reciprocating through subcycles that possess high degrees of connectivity with one another. One such scheme, proposed by Adams (1966) for the rise of states and urban societies. Needless to say, the equations needed to translate this and similar models have not been written, and the magnitudes of the coefficients cannot even be guessed at the present time.

In both the unifactorial and multifactorial models of social evolution, an increasing internalization of the controls is postulated. This shift is considered to be the basis of the two-stage acceleration cited earlier. At the beginning of hominid evolution, the prime movers were external environmental pressures no different from those that have guided the social evolution of other animal species. For the moment, it seems reasonable to suppose that the hominids underwent two adaptive shifts in succession:
1) first, to open-country living and seed eating, and
2) second, after being preadapted by the anatomical and mental changes associated with seed eating, to the capture of large mammals. Big-game hunting induced further growth in mentality and social organization that brought the hominids across the threshold into the autocatalytic, more nearly internalized phase of evolution. This second stage is the one in which the most distinctive human qualities emerged.

Wilson doesn't mean that social evolution happened independent of the environment after the 2nd stage. What happened was that mental and social change came to depend more on internal reorganization and less on direct responses to features in the surrounding environment. Social evolution, in short, had acquired its own motor.

The Future:

When mankind has achieved an ecological steady state, probably by the end of the twenty-first century, the internalization of social evolution will be nearly complete. About this time biology should be at its peak, with the social sciences maturing rapidly. But historical precedents have misled us before: the subjects we are talking about are more difficult than physics or chemistry by at least two orders of magnitude.

Consider the prospects for sociology. This science is now in the natural history stage of its development. There have been attempts at system building but, just as in psychology, they were premature and came to little. Much of what passes for theory in sociology today is really labeling of phenomena and concepts, in the expected manner of natural history. Process is difficult to analyze because the fundamental units are elusive, perhaps nonexistent.

Reductionism: With an increase in the richness of descriptions and experiments, sociology is drawing closer each day to cultural anthropology, social psychology, and economics, and will soon merge with them. These disciplines are fundamental to sociology sensu lato and are most likely to yield its first phenomenological laws. In fact, some viable qualitative laws probably already exist.

The transition from purely phenomenological to fundamental theory in sociology must await a full, neuronal explanation of the human brain. Only when the machinery can be torn down on paper at the level of the cell and put together again will the properties of emotion and ethical judgment come clear. Simulations can then be employed to estimate the full range of behavioral responses and the precision of their homeostatic controls. Stress will be evaluated in terms of the neurophysiological perturbations and their relaxation times. And so on.

The role of evolutionary sociobiology in this enterprise will be twofold:

1) It will attempt to reconstruct the history of the machinery and to identify the adaptive significance of each of its functions. Some of the functions are almost certainly obsolete, being directed toward such Pleistocene exigencies as hunting and gathering and intertribal warfare. Others may prove currently adaptive at the level of the individual and family but maladaptive at the level of the group - or the reverse.

If the decision is taken to mold cultures to fit the requirements of the ecological steady state, some behaviors can be altered experientially without emotional damage or loss in creativity. Others cannot. Uncertainty in this matter means that Skinner's dream of a culture predesigned for happiness will surely have to wait for the new neurobiology. A genetically accurate and hence completely fair code of ethics must also wait.

2) The second contribution of evolutionary sociobiology will be to monitor the genetic basis of social behavior. Optimum socioeconomic systems can never be perfect, because of Arrow's impossibility theorem and probably also because ethical standards are innately pluralistic.

Moreover, the genetic foundation on which any such normative system is built can be expected to shift continuously. Mankind has never stopped evolving, but in a sense his populations are drifting. The effects over a period of a few generations could change the identity of the socioeconomic optima. The result could be an eventual lessening of altruistic behavior through the maladaption and loss of group-selected genes.

It was shown earlier that behavioral traits tend to be selected out by the principle of metabolic conservation when they are suppressed or when their original function becomes neutral in adaptive value. Such traits can largely disappear from populations in as few as ten generations.

With our present inadequate understanding of the human brain, we do not know how many of the most valued qualities are linked genetically to more obsolete, destructive ones. Cooperativeness toward groupmates might be coupled with aggressivity toward strangers, creativeness with a desire to own and dominate and so on. In extreme cases such pairings could stem from pleiotropism, the control of more than one phenotypic character by the same set of genes. In this, the ultimate genetic sense, social control would rob man of his humanity.

It seems that our autocatalytic social evolution has locked us onto a particular course which the early hominids still within us may not welcome. To maintain the species indefinitely we are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms, and the social sciences come to full flower, the result might be hard to accept.

Completed

[5b] M. Sahlins (1976), The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology, only p. ix-28, 56-67. Key pages: 10-11, 17-18 23-24. 64-65.

In brief, Sociobiology has occasioned a crisis of connaissance and conscience, of knowledge and public consciousness, with overtones as much political or ideological as they have been
academic. Willy-nilly, the present essay becomes part of the controversy. This essay addresses the general intellectual and ideological issues raised by Sociobiology and related writings from the particular
vantage of a practicing anthropologist, which is to say, from a traditional vantage of what culture is.

For the central intellectual problem does come
down to the autonomy of culture and of the study of
culture. Sociobiology challenges the integrity of culture as a thing-in-itself, as a distinctive and symbolic human creation. In place of a social constitution of meanings, it offers a biological determination of human interactions with a source primarily in the general evolutionary_propensity or individual
genotypes to maximize their reproductive success. The "New Synthesis" is to include the humanities and social sciences. As the subject matter of these disciplines is not truly unique, they should be incorporated within an evolutionary biology that is prepared to supply their fundamental determinations.' One of the functions of sociobiology, then, si to
reformulate the foundations of the social sciences in a way that draws these subjects into the Modern Synthesis.

Shalins answers Wilson above by arguing that they cannot,
because biology, while it is an absolutely necessary condition for culture, is equally and certainly insufficient: ti is completely unable to specity the cultural properties of human behavior or their variations from one human group to another.

On the other hand, in the larger society sociobiologists have had to bear vigorous attacks from people of the Left. Sociobiology is
denounced as another incarnation of social Darwinism. The sociobiologists are accused of perpetrating an ideological justification for an oppressive status quo in which they happen to be rather privileged participants.

Some might say that they (sociobiologists) were unaware of the political dimensions of their argument, but this poses complex issues of criticism which again are presented on two levels. The first is, what to say about the intentions of the sociobiologists, or more precisely, are their motivations at all relevant? I would say they are not at all relevant. Shalin argues that
there is no necessary relation between the cultural
character of a given act, institution, or belief and the
motivations people may have for participating in it.
While I do believe that the theory of sociobiology
has an intrinsic ideological dimension, in fact a profound historical relation to Western competitive capitalism, this itself is a fact that has to be culturally and meaningtully analyzed-precisely because the lack of agreement between the character of t h e ideological act and the quality of the intent precludes any easy individualistic explanation.

Furthermore, and this is the second difficulty which criticism must acknowledge, it can be argued that there is no logical isomorphism either between sociobiology and social oppression. How, then, are we to explain the sensitivity of the Left to the thesis of sociobiology? For that sensitivity is surely a social fact. A n d h o w are we to account for the fascination of the public and the media? That is another social fact. The ideological controversy provoked by sociobiology is an important cultural phenomenon in itself. It suggests some kind ot deep relation between the theory of
human action advanced by sociobiology and the self-consciousness Westerners have of their own social existence.

Part 1: Biology and Culture, attempts to determine the inadequacies of sociobiology as a theory of culture. It consists of a critique in two stages. The
first will be a brief criticism of what I call "the
vulgar sociobiology,". The premise is that human social phenomena are the direct expression of human behavioral dispositions or emotions, such as aggressiveness, sexuality, o r altruism, the dispositions themselves having been laid down in the course of mammalian, primate,
or hominid phylogeny. The next and longer section is concerned
with "kin selection," which is a particularly salient form of the idea that human social behavior is determined by a calculus of individual reproductive success.

Part 2: Biology and Ideology, examines. the transformations of evolutionary theory itself that have been occasioned by its ventures into social organization, especially human social organization. I argue that the traditional understanding of "natural selection" has been progressively assimilated to the theory of social action characteristic of the competitive marketplace, theory characteristic of a late and historically specific development of Euro-American culture. From the idea of differential reproduction dependent on chance genetic and environmental shifts, selection successively became synonymous with optimization or maximization at individual genotypes, and ultimately with the exploitation of one organism by another in the interest egotistical genetic fitness.

Conceived in the image of the market system, the nature thus culturally figured has been in turn used to explain the human social order, and vice versa, ni an endless reciprocal interchange between social Darwinism and natural capitalism. Sociobiology, it is argued, is only the latest phase in this cycle: the grounding of human social behavior in an advanced or scientific notion of organic evolution, which is in its own terms the representation of
a cultural form of economic action. Hence, we have
the popular and political reaction that greeted the
announcement of this "New Synthesis."

Pages 10-11:

Is violence an act of aggression, generosity a
sign of "altruism"? Ethnographers of Melanesia as
well as psychoanalysts of America will readily testify
that aggression is often satisfied by making large
and unrequited gifts. On the other hand, a person may well hit another out of a true concern for the latter's weltare. One man's
altruism becomes some child's sore behind. There is, in human
affairs, a motivational arbitrariness of the social sign
that runs parallel to, in fact si due to, Saussure's
famous referential arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign. Any given psychological disposition is able to
take on an indefinite set of institutional realizations. We war on the playing fields of Ann Arbor, express sexuality by painting a picture, even indulge our aggressions and commit mayhem by writing books and giving lectures.

Conversely,it is impossible to say in advance what needs may be realized by any given social activity. That is why Ruth Benedict, upon examining diverse patterns of culture, came to the conclusion that one cannot define a given social domain by a characteristic human motive, such as economics by the drive to accumulate wealth or politics by the quest for power.

In sum, the sociobiological reasoning from evolutionary phylogeny to social morphology is interrupted by culture. For between the basic drives that may be attributed to human nature and the social structures of human culture there enters a critical indeterminacy. The same human motives appear in different cultural forms, and ditterent motives appear in the same forms. A fixed correspondence being lacking between the character of society and the human character, there can be no biological determinism.

Culture is the essential condition of this freedom or the human order from emotional or motivational necessity. Men interact in the terms of a system of meanings, attributed to persons and the objects of their existence, but precisely as these attributes are symbolic they cannot be discovered ni the intrinsic properties of the things to which they refer.

Page 17-18: Kin Selection

Whether the scientific sociobiology will succeed in goal of incorporating the human sciences depends largely on the fate of its theory of kin selection. This is true for several reasons.

1) One is the significance of kinship in the so-called primitive
societies, from which may be inferred its importance throughout the earlier and greater portion of human history. Sociobiology purports to provide a theory of that importance and of how kinship behavior si ordered.

Kinship is the dominant structure of many of the peoples anthropologists have studied, the prevailing code not only in the domestic sphere but generally of economic, political, and ritual action. The problem is whether this fact is cultural or, as Wilson says, biological; and , whether
the explanation ought to at least include biological
factors. But there is still another issue which makes
the problem doubly critical. It is that the interpretation sociobiology offers for kinship is only a special
instance of its reliance on the idea of individual
reproductive success as the mainspring of social behavior- not only in men but throughout the animal kingdom. This emphasis is a logical deduction from the definition of natural selection as differential reproduction among members of a species or population.

An eftective anthropological criticism of kin selection, therefore, would do great damage to the thesis and interdisciplinary objectives of sociobiology. If kinship is not ordered by individual reproductive success, and if kinship is admittedly central
to human social behavior, then the project of an
encompassing sociobiology collapses. The issue between sociobiology and social anthropology is decisively joined on the field of kinship.

Pages 23-24:

Meanwhile, in order to participate in a dialogue
with sociobiology, anthropologists will have to agree,
it only momentarily, that kinship may be defined
as "genealogical connections." They will have to
suspend their hard-won understanding that human
kinship is not a naturally given set of "blood rela-
tionships" but a culturally variable system
of meaningful categories.

The response of sociobiology is that knowledge of genealogical relationships is always the secret wisdom of the genes, whatever the appearent form of a people's consciousness. Presumably, the algebra of kin-selection also will be unconcious. Thus, it does not matter what people - including ethnographers - may say or think; as biological orgnaisms they are compelled by natural laws to maximize their inclusive fitness.

From this, incidentally, issues a view of social life more or less widely shared by sociobiologists: society is basically founded on lies. Human society, Alexander tells us, "is a network of lies and deception, presisting only because systems of conventions about permissable kinds and extents of living have arisen. Wilson agrees with this conception.

Wilson, however, is at least equivocal (open to more than one interpretation) about the degree of consciousness people have of kin selection. He speaks, on one hand, of the human
mind's "intuitive calculus of blood ties " - a phrase
in some respects contradictory in itself - and on the
other hand, of people's keen awareness of such ties.

There is really some hidden, disarticulated structure of genetic
selt-interest. We thus arrive at a point of argument
where there is no appeal but to the facts. I have to
insist from the outset- taking my stand on the whole
of the ethnographic record- that the actual systems
of kinship and concepts of heredity in human societies, though they never conform to biological coefficients of relationship, are true models of and for social action.

Page 64-65:

Once again ni this sense, culture si properly understood as an intervention in nature rather than the self-mediation of the latter through symbols. And the biological givens, such as human mating and other facts of life, come into play as instruments of the cultural project, not as its imperatives.

In the same vein, one might add that gravity
constitutes a limit to biological forms: every stage
in the life history of every species has to conform
to it, and any mutation that might seek structurally to do otherwise does so at its peril. But a limit si only a negative determination; it does not positively specity how the constraint si realized. Within the limits of gravity, every stage of every species has developed; hence such limits explain nothing of the
differentia specifica of life forms, but only the failure of any of them to exceed certain tolerances.

In such a hierarchy of determinations, physical and chemical laws stand as absolutely necessary for the explanation of biological phenomena, but they are equally and certainly insufficient.

The same kind of hierarchical relationship holds
for culture vis-a-vis biology (and by implication,
physics and chemistry). Culture is biology plus the
symbolic faculty. If we were to ask how a given
system of kinship, chieftainship, or religious beliefs
acquired its properties, we would have to have a
theory of symbolic attribution. Or to take the same
old apple: fi asked to explain why it had waterproof
wax on the outside or why it contained dormant
embryos, the principles of natural selection would
be sufficient for a satisfying explanation. But it we
wanted to know why this fruit and not some other
was the sign of carnal knowledge and. its consump-
tion the source of the original sin, we would need
a theory of meaning.

In human cultural behavior, we are NOT dealing with a multifactorial or overdetermined system into which several considerations of different order and nature enter in certain determinable proportions: a compound of 10 percent biology, 5
percent physics, 3 percent chemistry, 0.7 percent
geology, 0.3 percent the action of heavenly bodies
and 81 percent the symbolic logic.

All of the organic and inorganic constraints are in some sense 100 percent involved: in the sense that cultural life must
conform to natural laws. But a law of nature stands to a fact of culture only as a limit does to a form, a constant to a difference, and a matrix to a practice. It will never be possible to explain the
cultural properties of any such fact by referring it to underlying contents of a different order.

How then does biology figure in culture? In
the least interesting ways as a set of natural limits
on human functioning. Most critically, human biology puts at the disposition of culture a set of means for the construction of a symbolic order. One of the best documented examples is color perception. Culture/language affects our color perception. Some groups of people can only percieve few colors.

Completed

[6a] M. Hunt (2007), The Story of Psychology, Revised Edition, only p. 274-298, 311-317 ("The Behaviorists"). Key Pages: 275-277, 289-291, 295-296.

Many psychologists, when they first heard about this experiment (Pavlov's and other animal experiments), said that it represented a type of association that accounted for only simple forms of behavior in animals; the researcher, however, believed that the principle he had discovered would explain even the most advanced and complex forms of behavior ni human beings.

These experiments and many like them were part of a bold attempt,
beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, to answer-actually, to
eliminate from discussion- the most perplexing and intractable problems of psychology: those having to do with the nature of mind.

Puzzling questions about the nature of the mind, mental states and procesess of thinking that occupied philosophers, though their efforts
created more puzzles than they solved.

There was, however, another and totally different answer to such
questions, though it was abhorrent to most philosophers and psychologists. Mind is an illusion; there is no incorporeal self within us; our
mental experiences, including consciousness, awareness of self, and
thinking, are only physiological events taking place in the nervous system in response to stimuli.

Over the centuries a few materialist philosophers suggested this alter-
native in vague and unconvincing terms, but as the physical and physio-
logical sciences developed, the hypothesis became increasingly specific and plausible. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Helmholtz and a number of other physiologists were linking simple sensations to electrochemical events in the sensory nerves, and followers of Wundt were beginning their effort to construct a whole psychology out of the elemental components of sensation and perception.

Toward the end of the century the rejection of "mentalism" (the belief
in mind as a separate essence) gained support from a quite different quarter- animal psychology, a field in which interest had been sparked by Darwin's demonstration of the link between humankind and the other species. At first some biologists and psychologists had assumed that animals possess thought processes similar to, though simpler than, our own; in the 1880s, George Romanes, an English biologist, explored animal psychology through "introspection by analogy"; he asked himself what he would do were he the animal in any given situation. But in 1894 the zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan- the researcher who offered two kinds of caterpillars to chicks and two colors of corn kernels to chickens-sliced this approach to the bone with a version of Ockham's Razor >>>> Morgan's Canon: In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.

Jacques Loeb, a German-born biologist, went even further. During
the 1890s, when he was teaching in the United States, he argued on the
basis of wide-ranging evidence that a good deal of animal behavior consists of"tropisms, a term he used for all involuntary responses of worms, insects, and even higher animals to stimuli. In his view, much or most animal behavior consists of such tropisms, the creature being no more than a stimulus-driven automaton.

The implication of al this seemed clear to agrowing number of psychologists: it human beings are related to animals,and it animal behavior can be explained without mentalist concepts, then part of human behavior-perhaps even al of it-can be, too. The answer to the
intractable questions about the nature and operations of the mind might be utterly simple: mind does not exist, or if it does, it can be ignored, since ti si not only unobservable but unnecessary to the explanation of behavior.

For the behaviourists: Behavior -overt, visible, indisputable action- that is the real subject of psychology, rather than memory, reasoning, will, and all the other unseen processes imagined by mentalist psychologists. Not conjectures and hypotheses about invisible functions, but laws derived from observable phenomena, such as the cat's learning to escape from the puzzle box, could be the substance of a thoroughly objective and rigorously scientific psychology. Such was the thinking of many psychologists in the 1890s and the early 1900s, long before the word "behaviorism" had been coined or the theory's tenets set forth.

Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviourism: Throndike and Pavlov. The animal experiments mentioned above exemplify two different principles of behaviorism:

1) the laws of natural learning (the chickens associ-
ating a particular color with the reward of the sweet-tasting corn, the
cats associating astep on the treadle with escape and food).
2) the laws of conditioning (the dog's salivating at the sound of the metronome, a stimulus artiticially linked to the salivary reflex).

These laws were discovered by two men of dissimilar backgrounds, training, and personality, one a brilliant and dedicated psychologist (Thorndike), the other a physiologist who was scornful of psychology and doubted that it could be regarded as a science (Pavlov).

Pages 289-291:

Watson's swift rise had been, ni part, the consequence of carefully cultivated contacts but, in larger part, of splendid experimental work in antmal learning. He taught rats to make their way through a miniature replica ofthe maze at Hampton Court, Henry VIll's royal retreat outside London. Watson concluded that kinesthetic cues-muscle sensations- were the key element in the rats learning process.

From such research and from his knowledge of the work of
Thorndike and other objectivists, Watson, rejecting all conjectures
about invisible mental processes, began to formulate a new psychology based entirely on observable behavior. He first voiced these views at psychological meetings in 1908 and 1912 (in the latter year he And James R. Angell independently coined the term "behaviorist").

The manifesto, "Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It," started of
with a declaration of independence from all schools of psychology that dealt with mental processes: Psychology as the behaviorist views it si a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation ni terms of consciousness.

In three sentences, Watson had proclaimed three revolutionary principles:
1) first, the content of psychology should be behavior, not consciousness;
2) second, its method should be objective rather than introspective;
3) third, its purpose should be "prediction and control of behavior" rather than fundamental understanding of mental events.

Why psychology failed to become a natural science for Watson? Watson charged that psychology had failed to become an undisputed
natural science because it was concerned with conscious processes that were invisible, subjective, and incapable of precise dehnition.

Watson's assault on introspection as a method ofresearch was based on its failure to yield objective data.

For good measure, Watson also dismissed all dualist discussions of
mind and body, whether couched in metaphysical terms or modern
ones. In place of the psychology he junked, he proposed a new one free of all such terms as "consciousness," "mental states," and "mind." Its sole subject matter would be behavior. Based on the premise that all organisms adjust to their environment and that certain stimuli lead them to make the necessary responses, psychology would study the connections between stimuli and responses (S-R psychology), that is, the ways in which rewarding responses are learned and unrewarding ones are not. Since consciousness would be ignored, much of this study could be carried on with animals; indeed, "the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane as being equally essential to the study of behavior."

Watson's manitesto was actually less original than ti seemed; it presented ideas that had been germinating for fifteen years. But ti did so inan audacious, forceful, and crystallizing way; it was, in short, a sales pitch.

Whatever the reason, Watson was flying high, but he knew that he had not yet suggested a specific method by which behaviorists could pursue research, and in his presidential address to the APA he addressed this problem. He now had something ot offer: the conditioned reflex method. Though he knew only the bare outlines of Pavlov's work, he presented it as a model for behaviorist experimentation not only with animals but with humans. He noted that his student Karl Lashley (who had disproven Pavlov's physiological theory), had already made a removable fistula that could be installed inside the human cheek; with it, he had successfully measured both unconditioned and conditioned saltvary reflexes in human volunteers.

Pages 295-296:

During the first decade of his banishment from the academic world, Watson continued to write books and magazine articles about behaviourism and child rearing.

Waston's psychology (S-R psychology) attributing all human behaviour to S-R conditioning, was a simple convenient rebuttal of the hereditarian views of Galton's followers and appealed broadly to liberals and egalitarians - an irony, since Watson was politically conservative. Watson suggested that behavioursim could create a better world by scientifically engineering the development of personality. He viewed infants as blank slates. He was way more on the nurture side when it comes to explaining behaviour.

Watson had oversimplified or overstated many issues, and other behaviorists later had to elaborate on and qualify them. Almost no one today holds as extreme an environmental position as he did, nor does anyone now recommend withholding affection from children and rearing them by frigid behavioral rules. The Pavlovian conditioning that he made the keystone of his system proved not to be the only significant kind; later behaviorists added to ti another major model called "operant" conditioning. Most important, at the very time that Watson received the gold medal it was becoming clear
that chains of S-R units (series of linked conditioned stimulus-response
connections), no matter how long, could NOT adequately explain complex and sophisticated kinds of behavior.

Completed

[8] F. Copleston (1956), A History of Philosophy, Vol. 11, Logical Positivism and Existentialism, only p. 125-147, 201-209 ("Existentialism"). Key Pages: 125, 201

The term "existentialism" does not connote any one particular philosophical system.

M. Sartre called it "existentialism". Gabrial Marcel rejected the validy of the title "existentialist". This procedure would also have the advantage of allowing for the fact that Martin Heidegger has dissociated himself from M. Sartre and has drawn attention to the differences between their respective philosophies.

Further, one has to make a distinction between the Existenzphilosophie of Karl Jaspers and the Existenzialphilosophie of Heidegger; and this distinction tends to be slurred over fi one applies the term "existentialism" indiscriminately to both philosophies.

But I cannot in these lectures reserve the term "existentialism" for the philosophy of Sartre. You will quite rightly expect me to talk about those philosophers who are generally called "existentialists." And they certainly include not only Sartre but also Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger and Marcel. There are other writers too who might well be included, such as Abbagnano, Merleau-Ponty, Berdyaev and Camus, though the only one of these of whom I propose to say anything much is Camus. In other words, I intend to take the conventional line of talking about those philosophers who are customarily discussed in books about existentialism. I certainly do not intend to go back to Socrates, or even to St. Augustine; and still less do I propose to discuss Thomism which, according to
some Thomists, is the true existentialism. For I take it that
what you expect from me is a discussion of the modern
existentialist movement.

Now, I have said that there are very considerable differences between the various philosophies which are customarily classed as existentialist philosophies. And I hope that some of these differences will become clear when I deal in individual thinkers. But if the habit of grouping these different philosophies together and treating them as members of a class is not simply the fruit of misunderstanding and misinterpretation but has an objective justification in the nature of these philosophies, there must be, besides differences, some common elements.

In the first place I do not think that we can successfully define and mark off existentialism, considered as a general movement, in terms of a particular abstract proposition such as "existence precedes essence."

As a conclusion to this lecture I should like to come back
to the existentialists' use of the term "existence." I have
alluded to the distinction between authentic and unauthentic existence. And this suggests that the existentialists who make this distinction understand by existence the specific mode of being of man whereby authentic and unauthentic existence are both open to him as potentialities, as possible determinations of his original mode of being.

The meaning of such statements (by Marcel) is hardly self-evident; but they indicate at least a use of the term "existence" which is different from the use to which the term si put by Jaspers and by Heidegger, and which
we think of as the characteristic existentialist use of the term.

If on speaks of man as "possible " or " potential " existence,
faced with the choice between authentic and unauthentic
existence, the terms " authentic " and " unauthentic " seem,
at first sight at least, to imply valuational judgments.

But even if the term "authentic" is not used in a valuational sense, it must, I think, If it is used meaningfully, indicate a mode of existence which bears a special relation to what man already is. Man is the sort of being who, if he exists authentically, exists in this particular way. Whether this fits in with Sartre's interpretation of the proposition " existence precedes essence" is another question; but if it is proper to make the distinction between authentic and unauthentic existence, it must, it seems to me be proper to speak of a man as willing or as not willing to become what in some sense he already is. And in fact Kierkegaard does speak in this way. The question then arises, what is man, and what is the precise content of the specific mode of existence which si called " authentic existence." Here, I think, we come to the parting of the ways.

Looked at in the light of these questions, existentialism can be divided into theistic and atheistic existentialism. And I shall speak in the next lecture of theistic existentialism. I place it first, not simply because I myself believe in God, but because, as far as the modern existentialist movement si concerned, it si historically prior. Kierkegaard's philosophy was a deeply religious philosophy; and both Jaspers and Marcel are older men than Sartre.

Page 201: A Critical Discussion of Existentialism

EXISTENTIALISM, as we have seen, lays emphasis on the
human situation or condition. We are told, tor example,
that man finds himself in the world, that he is a being in the
world. We are told that he is a finite, unstable being, menaced by death from the start.

As a conscious free being, man stands out from the background of nature. He is not immersed in the stream of life in the same sense that a cat or a dog si immersed ni the stream of life; and his intellect is not bound exclusively to the service of his biological and economic needs. He can, indeed, by his own choice endeavour to identity himself with society, with the group consciousness, and thus try to evade the responsibility of freedom. But he can also acknowledge in " dread " his own freedom and responsibility, which set him apart in lonely isolation. He can raise the problem of the meaning of his own existence and that of human history in general. He can seek for clarity about the goal of human life and about values.

But, it may be objected, is not most of this stale news? The
truth of the proposition that man is free is, indeed, a matter
of dispute. And if the existentialist says that man is free, he
is not uttering a triviality in the sense of a proposition, the
truth of which is admitted by all. But we are surely all well
aware that man is a being in the world. And if we wish to receive further information about, for example, man's particular relations to other things or about the causes of death and the nature of the process which is known as "dying" the scientist is a better source of information than the philosopher. What the existentialist does is to enunciate trivialities, in the sense of propositions which tell us what we all know already. And the fact that these familiar truths are dressed up in solemn and often rather obscure language does not alter the fact that they are familiar truths. We are given no new information.

Completed

[6b] M. Hunt (2007), The Story of Psychology, Revised Edition, only p. 459-470, 476-485, 488-490, 497-504 ("The Social Psychologists"). Key pages: 459-460, 264, 500-504

Q: What busy and productive held of modern psychology has no clear cut identity and not even a generally accepted dehnition?
A: Social psychology. It si less a field than a no man's land between psychology and sociology, overlapping each and also impinging on anthropology, criminology, several other social sciences, and neuroscience. Ever since the emergence of social psychology, its practitioners have had trouble agreeing on what ti is. In cognitive neuroscience you can say, I' study the brain, but ni social psychology you can't say anything clear-cut like that.

Definitions of Social Psychology:

Social psychology is the study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behavior are influenced by interactions and transactions between people.

The problem is that social psychology has no unitying concept; it did not develop from the seed of a theoretical construct (as did behaviorism and Gestalt psychology) but grew like crabgrass in uncultivated regions of the social sciences.

Roger Brown (a Social Psychologist): I myself cannot find any single attribute or any combination ot attributes that will clearly distinguish the topics of social psychology from topics that remain within general experimental psychology or sociology or anthropology or linguistics. Roughly speaking, of course, social psychology is concerned with the mental processes (or behavior) of persons insofar as these are determined by past or present interaction with other persons, but this is rough and it is not a definition that excludes very much.

Page 264:

No such sampling, however varied, can do justice to the range of subjects and research methods of social psychology, but perhaps the specimens give some idea ofwhat the held is about-or at least what it is not about. It is NOT about what goes on strictly within one's head, as ni Cartesian, Jamesian, or Freudian introspection, NOR is it about large sociological phenomena, like stratification, social organization, and social
institutions. It is about everything in between -whatever an individual thinks or does as a result of what other individuals think or do, or what the first person thinks the others are thinking or doing.

As Gordon Allport wrote many years ago, social psychology si "an attempt ot understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others."

Pages 500-504

It is impossible ot draw the boundaries of social psychology; like the former British Empire, ti sprawls across a vast world of human thought, feeling, and behavior.

The Value of Social Psychology:

Like that empire and many another, social psychology has undergone attacks from without and rebellions from within. Its hodgepodge of topics, overextended battle lines, bold and sometimes offensive experimental methods, and lack of integrating theory have all made it an inviting target.

The most intense attack came from within. Among the sundry charges they lashed themselves with were that their held paid too little attention to practical applications (but conversely that it paid too little attention to theory); that it devoted far too much effort to studies of trivial details but conversely that ti hopped from one big issue to another without completing studies of the details); and that it made unjustifiable generalizations about human nature on the basis of mini-experiments with American college undergraduates.

This last criticism was the most troubling. In 1974, when self-criticism was at its peak, college students were the experimental subjects 78% of the studies reported ni one leading journal and 47% of those in another. Such lab research might be internally valid (it showed what it said it showed), but might not be and probably was not externally valid (what it showed did not necessarily apply to the outside world).

The most disturbing assault, expanding the charge that the findings of sociopsychological research lack external validity, was made by Kenneth Gergen of Swarthmore College in 1973. In a journal article that torched his own profession, he asserted that social psychology si not a science but a branch of history.It claims to discover principles of behavior that hold true for all humankind but that really account only for phenomena
pertaining ot a given sample of people ni a specific cultural setting at a particular time in history.

As examples, Gergen said the Milgram obedience experiment was dependent on contemporary attitudes toward authority but that these were not universal. Gergen's drastic conclusion: It is a mistake to consider the processes in social psychology as basic in the natural science sense. Rather, they may be largely considered the psychological counterpart of cultural norms ... Social psychological research is primarily the systematic study of contemporary history.

For some years following the publication of Gergen's scathing critique, social psychologists held many soul-searching symposia devoted to his thesis. Eventually, the debate did yield sound answers to the barbed questions hurled by Gergen and others, and restored the image of social psychology as a science.

To the charge that what si true of college undergraduates may not be true of the rest of humankind, methodologists replied that for purposes of testing a hypothesis, the population being studied si not a critical issue. If variable X leads to variable Y, and in the absence of X there is no
Y, the causal connection between X and Y si proven for that group; to the extent that it is also found true of other groups, it si likely to be a general truth. (The recent emphasis on cross-cultural psychology has proven that to be the case with many a a finding , including the Milgram obedience phenomenon and Latane's social-loafing principle)

In a thoroughgoing rebuttal of Gergen's charges, Barry Schlenker of the University of Florida pointed out that the physical sciences, too, began with limited and contradictory observations and gradually developed general theories that harmonized their seeming inconsistencies. In the same way, the social sciences have identined, in limited contexts,
what seem to be human universals, and brought together wider-ranging proof. Social psychology, said Schlenker, was following the same route, and the principles of social learning, conformity, and status dominance were among the findings that have already been shown to have multicultural validity. By the end of the 1970s the crisis was abating, and afew years later Edward Jones could view it and the future of the held with optimism.

However, it remains true that social psychology has no unifying theory, but many of its middle-range theories have been widely validated, and their jumbled mass of findings impressively adds to humankind's understanding of its own nature and behavior.

Social Psychology's value not only lies in gaining a deeper understanding of fundamental principles but also when it comes to matters of practical applications to real-life concerns.

The beneficial uses of social psychology are remarkable: among them are ways to get better compliance by medical patients; the use of cooperative rather than competitive classroom methods; social support groups and networks for the widowed and divorced, substance abusers, and others in
crisis; training in interpersonal communication in T-groups; the improving of the mood and mental functioning of nursing home patients by giving them greater control and decision-making power; new ways of treating depression, loneliness, and shyness; classroom training in empathy and prosocial behavior; control of family conflict by means of small-group and family therapy.

Elliot Aronson voiced what he and many other social psychologists felt about their held: Social psychology can have a profound and beneficial impact on our lives by providing an increased understanding of such important phenomena as conformity, persuasion, prejudice, love, and aggression.

Virtually everything we do, feel, or think si related in some way to the social side of life. In fact, our relations with other people are so central ot our lives and happiness that it si hard ot imagine existing without them. In short, the social side of life is, in many ways, the core of our existence. It is this basic fact that makes social psychology--the branch of psychology that studies all aspects of social behavior and social thought - so fascinating and essential."

The last sentence above is why Hunt argues that social psychology not having proper boundaries, no agreed-upon definition and no unifying theory does not matter much really. Social psychology has proven its value enough for that to not matter.

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