Philosophy,Its Pitfalls,Some Rescue Plans,and Their Complications

This article offers the motivation for organising a conference on philosophy as it is practised across several faculties and departments at the University of Cambridge. It also offers an overview of the main themes that emerge in the essays collected in this issue of Metaphilosophy, which derive from the aforementioned conference. In particular it focuses on the risk of scholasticism and dogmatism that philosophy faces when it divorces itself from its own history, other disciplines, and real life. It then discusses the potential problems that can arise from the practice of philosophy in close conjunction with other disciplines, such as the natural sciences and the history of philosophy. Finally, it briefly comments on how institutional/academic structures have an influence on the way philosophy is practised.     

A REPLY TO ANNE KULL,EDUARDO CRUZ,AND MICHAEL DeLASHMUTT

In my reply to the essays by Anne Kull, Eduardo Cruz, and Michael DeLashmutt, I turn first to Cruz's charge that my use of “the sacred” is at odds with a growing religious studies mainstream that understands religion in secular terms. I suggest that this latter approach has its own problems, deriving partly from its neglect of the political, constructed nature of the category of “religion.” Second, in relation to Cruz's suggestion that my lack of attention to explanation compromises my claim to be social scientific, I defend a broader understanding of the human sciences and explore the relationships between understanding, critique, and history, and between sociology and theology. Third, reflecting on DeLashmutt's suggestion that I neglect the way that technical invention provides a glimpse of divine creativity, and the myth making that goes on around technology in vehicles such as science fiction, I argue that such issues have to be approached in a radically historical way. I conclude by identifying three challenges: to explore more deeply how technological objects form part of human being‐in‐the‐world, to show how my approach might offer practical resources for assessing technological and environmental developments, and to expand my analysis to include non‐Western religious traditions.     

B. F. Skinner and G. H. Mead: on biological science and social science.

Skinner's contributions to psychology provide a unique bridge between psychology conceptualized as a biological science and psychology conceptualized as a social science. Skinner focused on behavior as a naturally occurring biological phenomenon of interest in its own right, functionally related to surrounding events and, in particular (like phylogenesis), subject to selection by its consequences. This essentially biological orientation was further enhanced by Skinner's emphasis on the empirical foundations provided by laboratory-based experimental analyses of behavior, often with nonhuman subjects. Skinner's theoretical writings, however, also have affinity with the traditions of constructionist social science. The verbal behavior of humans is said to be subject, like other behavior, to functional analyses in terms of its environment, in this case its social context. Verbal behavior in turn makes it possible for us to relate to private events, a process that ultimately allows for the development of consciousness, which is thus said to be a social product. Such ideas make contact with aspects of G. H. Mead's social behaviorism and, perhaps of more contemporary impact in psychology, L. Vygotsky's general genetic law of cultural development. Failure to articulate both the biological and the social science aspects of Skinner's theoretical approach to psychology does a disservice to his unique contribution to a discipline that remains fragmented between two intellectual traditions.     

How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale

Recent changes in views on cognition underscore its embodied, situated and distributed character. These changes are compatible with the conceptual framework of ecological psychology. However for ecological psychology to propose explanations for a broad range of cognitive phenomena, including language, it needs an account of how to link the dynamics of coupling between the organism and the environment with the apparent symbolicity of informational structures. In this paper it is proposed that a theory of information in biological systems, advocated by Howard Pattee, may help forge this link. By treating informational structures as constraints on dynamics this approach helps to identify which processes, in which systems and on what time-scales are needed for structures to ‘become messages’. I will illustrate how these processes might work on developmental time-scale in the domain of language, building on the work by Edward Reed (1995, 1996) and extending it using the view of linguistic structures as constraints.     

Biology Precedes, Culture Transcends: An Evolutionist's View of Human Nature

I will, first, outline what we currently know about the last 4 million years of human evolutionary history, from bipedal but small-brained Australopithecus to modern Homo sapiens, our species, through the prolific toolmaker Homo habilis and the continent wanderer Homo erectus. I shall then identify anatomical traits that distinguish us from other animals and point out our two kinds of heredity, the biological and the cultural.
Biological inheritance is based on the transmission of genetic information, in humans very much the same as in other sexually reproducing organisms. But cultural inheritance is distinctively human, based on transmission of information by a teaching and learning process that is in principle independent of biological parentage. Cultural inheritance makes possible the cumulative transmission of experience from generation to generation. Cultural heredity is a swifter and more effective (because it can be designed) mode of adaptation to the environment than the biological mode. The advent of cultural heredity ushered in cultural evolution, which transcends biological evolution.
I will, finally, explore ethical behavior as a model case of a distinctive human trait, and seek to ascertain the causal connections between human ethics and human biology. My conclusions are that (1) moral reasoning—that is, the proclivity to make ethical judgments by evaluating actions as either good or evil—is rooted in our biological nature; it is a necessary outcome of our exalted intelligence, but (2) the moral codes that guide our decisions as to which actions are good and which ones are evil are products of culture, including social and religious traditions. This second conclusion contradicts those evolutionists and sociobiologists who claim that the morally good is simply that which is promoted by the process of biological evolution.     

Reversibility of single-incentive selective associations.

Rats were trained to press a lever in the presence of a tone-light compound stimulus and not to press in its absence. In each of two experiments, schedules were designed to make the compound a conditioned punisher for one group and a conditioned reinforcer for the other. In Experiment 1, one group's responding produced food in the presence of the compound but not in its absence. The other group's responding terminated the compound stimulus, and food was presented only in its absence. When tone and light were later presented separately, light controlled more responding than did tone in the former group, but tone gained substantial control in the latter. The same effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. In Experiment 2, two groups avoided shock in the presence of the compound stimulus. In the absence of the compound, one group was not shocked, and the other received both response-independent and response-produced shock. When tone and light were presented separately, the former group's responding was mainly controlled by tone, but the latter group's responding was almost exclusively controlled by light. These effects were also observed within subjects when the training schedules were switched over groups. Thus, these single-incentive selective association effects (appetitive in Experiment 1 and aversive in Experiment 2) were completely reversible. The schedules in which the compound should have been a conditioned reinforcer consistently produced visual control, and auditory control increased when the compound should have become a conditioned punisher. Currently accepted accounts of selective associations based on affinities between shock and auditory stimuli and between food and visual stimuli (i.e., stimulus-reinforcer interactions) do not adequately address these results. The contingencies of reinforcement most recently associated with the compound and with its absence, rather than the nature of the reinforcer, determined whether auditory or visual stimulus control developed.