Abstract
A consideration of the recent history of philosophy reveals that when thinking about unity of science, philosophers have mainly been thinking of unity through reduction of higher level theories to lower level theories. In other words, if unity was to be achieved it was through intertheoretic reduction. Lately, though, some philosophers (Darden and Maull, Philos Sci 44:43–64, 1977; McCauley and Bechtel, Theory Psychol 11:736–760, 2001; Mitchell and Dietrich, Am Nat 168:S73–S79, 2006) have started to question this exclusive focus on intertheoretic reduction in the discussions concerning the unity of science. These philosophers have also come to reject the global project of unification for more modest and local forms of unification: This is the area of pluralism. Pluralism complicates tremendously our understanding of the relations between theories. In fact, pluralism suggests that we are facing two distinct tasks: (1) Developing a typology of the intertheoretic relations; (2) Understanding on a case-by-case basis the relation between specific theories or specific frameworks. I believe that progress has been made with respect to (1), but I want to improve on the current understanding of the typology of intertheoretic relations. I take (2) to be essential: Many scientists have failed to understand what pluralism entails. They view their theories to be simply inconsistent with each other (when sometimes, they are not). It is important to understand the relations between actual sciences and between actual theories in order to avoid futile arguments and to develop better theories. In this paper, I will present Sandra Mitchell’s typology of inter-theoretic relations. I will then focus on a case study—the relations between the neurosciences and social cognitive psychology of racial prejudice. What will emerge is that the pluralism proposed by Mitchell should be enriched further to understand the real nature of the unity proposed in certain fields of science.
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Notes
- 1.
“Since Nagel’s influential model of reduction by derivation, most discussions of unity of science have been cast in terms of reductions between concepts and between theories” (Cat 1998, p. 532; see also Sarkar 1992, p. 168 for a similar view).
- 2.
For some clarification on the notion of level, see Sect. 11.2.
- 3.
Similarly, Mitchell et al. (1997), concludes that the Nagelian project “has failed” (p. 108). Actual causes and time of death will not be discussed here.
- 4.
For example, Neurath wrote the following: “The development of physicalist sociology does not mean the transfer of laws of physics to living things and their groups … Comprehensive sociological laws can be found, …, without the need to go back to the microstructure, and thereby to build up these sociological laws from physical ones” (quoted by Cat et al. 1996, p. 347).
- 5.
His stance is “new wave” because its attempt to capture some important aspects of the practice internal to science while downplaying the importance of general external philosophical questions can be seen as a reincarnation of the carnapian distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions (on this, see section 5.2 of Chap.1 of his 2003).
- 6.
“There is no need to evoke psychological causal explanations, and in fact scientists stop evoking and developing them, once real neurolobiological explanations are on offer” (Bickle 2003, p. 110).
- 7.
As he puts it: “ … the new wave approach construes the relation as the construction of an image … of the set-theoretic structure of models of the reduced theory T R within the set comprising reducing theory T B . ” (2003, p. 27)
- 8.
Bechtel and Hamilton (2007) and Faucher (2006) have insisted that while mechanism is typically reductionnist in spirit, it does not have to maintain that a complete causal story can be told at the lower level. Explanations of many phenomena will typically need to make reference to causal interactions of the mechanism with the environment (which will change the conditions of the parts and their mode of operation).
- 9.
Which is not to say that it will not sometimes be an accurate description, see for instance Bickle’s remarks about the molecular neurosciences of social recognition memory (2006, p. 423).
- 10.
Critics of Mitchell’s position have characterize here position, on the basis of her use of examples of the kind mentioned, a form of “modest pluralism” for her view about the disunity of science “seems to reduce to … monism because it is consistent with the idea that for every particular phenomenon, there is a single, best account” (Kellert et al. 2006, p. xii). More “radical” forms of pluralism are possible in which explanations are not expected to resolve into monism. See for instance, Fehr (2006) on explanations of the evolution of sex and Longino (2006) on the study of human behavior.
- 11.
Longino is quite clear that this form of compatible pluralism does not lead to integration: “If their partiality is accepted, each approach can be seen to produce some knowledge of behavior by answering the questions distinctive of it with methods that are also distinctive. But none of the approaches can yield a complete account … Each approach can produce partial knowledge. In concert, they constitute a nonunifiable plurality of partial knowledges” (2006, p. 127; my emphasis).
- 12.
To be more precise, in this case, one should note that the conflict was between theories instantiating different approaches. I will talk about a conflict of approaches or traditions of research to make short.
- 13.
For instance, Matthew Lieberman wrote that “although the social sciences and neurosciences have been hugely successful enterprises in their own right, there is a sense that we can now build an intellectual superhighway between themthat will allow us to catalyze the insights from both into a new kind of science that will yield important insights into the basic nature of the human mind…” (2006, p. 1; my emphasis).
- 14.
Cacioppo and Bernston defined social psychology as “the scientific study of social behavior, with an emphasis on understanding the individual in a social context. Accordingly, social psychologists study a diverse range of topics ranging from intrapersonal processes shaped by or in response to others, such as the self, attitudes, emotions, social identity, normative beliefs, social perception, social cognition, and interpersonal attraction; to interpersonal processes such as persuasion and social influence, verbal and nonverbal communication, interpersonal relationships, altruism, and aggression, to group processes such as social facilitation, cooperation and competition; …” (2006, p. 91). In the late 1970’s, social cognitive psychology emerged as a subfield of social psychology, focusing on information-processing accounts of the phenomena to be explained. With the growing success of cognitive neuroscience (Gazzaniga 1995), it was a matter of time before a discipline (or a sub-discipline) like “social cognitive neuroscience” would emerge.
- 15.
As Cunningham et al. put it: “[I]mplicit prejudice can … be defined as the automatic cognitive association between a social group and negative evaluation” (2004, p. 1334).
- 16.
As Darden and Maull put it: “… an interfield theory is likely to be generated when background knowledge indicates that relations already exist between the fields, when the fields share an interest in explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon, and when questions arise about that phenomenon within a field which cannot be answered with the techniques and concepts of that field” (1978, p. 50).
- 17.
As Susan Fiske puts it: “People accentuate differences between categories and minimize differences within categories (Capozza and Nanni 1986; Tajfel 1970; Taylor 1981). People tag other people by race, gender, and age, so they confuse people within groups and differentiate them between groups (Arcuri 1982; Taylor et al. 1978).” (2000, p. 304)
- 18.
The same process of construction of a “heuristic model” is standard in other domain of social cognitive neuroscience (and in cognitive neuroscience). As Ochsner and Lieberman (2001) put it: “When relatively little is known about the neural systems involved in a given form of behavior or cognition, initial studies serve more to identify brain correlates for those phenomena than to test theories about how and why the phenomena occur. This has been the case for many areas of cognitive neuroscience research as well. Ultimately, it will be important to move beyond brain-behavior correlations, but that can only happen when researchers in the fields have built a baseline of knowledge about the brain systems underlying specific types of social or emotional processing … Once one has an idea of which processes a brain area carries out, one can make use of that knowledge to test hypotheses about the involvement of those processes in a given behavior” (p.725 and 729; my emphasis).
- 19.
Neuroscientists seems to acknowledged the priority of social psychology. For instance, Todorov and his colleagues write: “Brain imaging and event-related potential (ERP) studies on race perception have relied on the rich literature in social psychology as a watershed for exploring the neural dynamics involved in stereotyping, prejudice, and other forms of outgroup perception” (Todorov et al. 2006, p. 78).
- 20.
Thus, we disagree with Phelps and Thomas above: The integration of neuroscience and social psychology has led to the discovery of new psychological phenomena.
- 21.
See Öhman et Mineka (2003) for a discussion of “prepared learning” for fear-relevant stimuli.
- 22.
The model is also as good as the neurological theories it is build on. For instance, it might be tempting to interpret amygdala activation in seeing other faces as suggesting that fear is a component of stereotyping. But one might want to resist this temptation by considering that amygdala activation has been associated not only with fear or negative evaluation, but also with positive emotions such as amusement and perception and happiness (Willingham and Dunn 2003, p. 666).
- 23.
Grantham talks of “unity” but following my earlier remark, I will rather speak in term of integration.
- 24.
Some might say that this is because the theories in each domains are not ripe for reduction or that the theories of cognitive social psychology are false (and therefore could not be derived or reduce to true theories). But one could argue the other way around and say that neurosciences of memory are reductionist because they are not ripe. Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2008) have advocated such a view showing that reduction, in certain case, is a first step that is then to be complemented by an account that considers the processes that were left behind in the reductionistic quest. My position is that in the case I studied, it is very unlikely that we will be able to do away with the cognitive and social levels of explanation.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Edouard Machery who read and commented several versions of this paper. He is responsible of many of the good ideas in it. Thank you also to Frédéric Bouchard and Pierre Poirier for comments on the last version of the paper. I tried my best to accommodate all their comments.
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Faucher, L. (2012). Unity of Science and Pluralism: Cognitive Neurosciences of Racial Prejudice as a Case Study. In: Pombo, O., Torres, J., Symons, J., Rahman, S. (eds) Special Sciences and the Unity of Science. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2030-5_11
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