Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Peter Richerson, A Prolegomenon to Nonlinear Empiricism in the Human Behavioral Sciences.Complexity marks human behavior. We live in huge societies with an intricate division of labor. We employ a vast array of technologies in virtually every ecological system in practically every corner of the planet. The biological foundation of our behavior is a metabolically expensive brain whose full complexity remains largely beyond the ken of science. Moreover, human culture stands as the world’s most intricate system for transmitting behavior extra-genetically. It leads to rapid evolution and prodigious behavioral diversity across societies. The social sciences all take complex human behavior as their object of study. In spite of this commonality, the various disciplines go about their respective studies with little communication across disciplinary boundaries. The chasm between the social sciences and biology has been even harder to bridge than the chasms among the social sciences. In addition, in spite of the fact that mathematics has proven its value countless times as a language for confronting complexity, the social sciences, with the notable exception of economics, have developed as the least mathematical of the sciences. The quantitative skills of many social scientists do not extend beyond static linear statistical models, and the proliferation of postmodernism has further eroded the role of mathematics in the social sciences.No categoriesReading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: des.ucdavis.edu | Scholar 
Similar books and articles
Gintis's article is an example of growing awareness by social scientists of the significance of evolutionary theory for understanding human nature. Although we share its main point of view, we comment on some disagreements related to levels of behavioral analysis, the explanation of social cooperation, and the ubiquity of inter-individual differences in human decision-making. (Published Online April 27 2007).
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The disagreement between philosophers about the scientific worth of the evolutionary behavioral sciences (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, etc.) is in part due to the fact that critics and advocates of these sciences characterize them very differently. In this article, by analyzing quantitatively the citations made in the articles published in Evolution & Human Behavior between January 2000 and December 2002, we provide some evidence that undermines the characterization of the evolutionary behavioral sciences put forward by their critics.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: bjps.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: bjps.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Unlike physics and chemistry, the behavioral sciences are historical sciences that explain the fuzzy complexity of social life through historical narratives. Unifying the behavioral sciences through evolutionary game theory would require a nested hierarchy of three kinds of historical narratives: natural history, cultural history, and biographical history. (Published Online April 27 2007).
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In its quest to become more scientific, many have held that social science should more closely emulate the methodology of natural science. This has proven difficult and has led some to assert the impossibility of a science of human behavior. I maintain, however, that many critics of empirical social science have misunderstood the foundation for the success of the natural sciences, which is not that they have discovered the "true vocabulary of nature," but—on the contrary—that they have realized the benefits of flexibility in "redescribing" familiar phenomena in alternative ways, in the pursuit of scientific explanations. In this paper I argue that this same path is open to the social sciences and that its pursuit would facilitate the prospects for the scientific study of human behavior.
No categories
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The social sciences must be biological ones, owing simply to the fact that they focus on the causes and effects of the behavior of members of a biological species, Homo sapiens. Our improved understanding of biology as a science and of the biological realm should enable us therefore to solve several of the outstanding problems of the philosophy of social science. The solution to these problems leaves most of the social and behavioral sciences pretty much as it finds them, though it does provide improved understanding of their scope, limits, and methods. Key Words: biology • natural selection • Darwinism • models • narratives • history.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: pos.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: pos.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A dialogue between the exact, the physical and the natural sciences along with the social and human sciences is both possible and necessary. The place where such a dialogue is truly prosperous is the one of the new sciences of complexity. However, with the study of complex systems, the very traditional status of the sciences changesdramatically.
No categories
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... Despite their distinct objects of study, the human behavioral sciences all include models of individual human behavior. Unity in the behavioral sciences requires that there be a common underlying model of individual human behavior, specialized and enriched to meet the particular needs of each discipline. Such unity does not exist, and cannot be easily attained, since the various disciplines have incompatible models and disparate research methodologies. Yet recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for unity in the behavioral sciences, incorporating core principles from all fields, and based upon theoretical tools (game theory and the rational actor model) and data gathering techniques (experimental games in the laboratory and field) that transcend disciplinary boundaries. This article sketches a set of principles aimed at fostering such a unity. Key Words: behavioral science • game theory • experimental economics • rational actor model.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: ppe.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: ppe.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... All three of the books under review— Science and Social Science by Malcolm Williams, Rethinking Science by Jan Faye, and Open the Social Sciences by the members of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Immanuel Wallerstein, chair)—argue for a broadly naturalist approach in which the social sciences are seen as of a piece with the natural sciences. Fortunately, all three do so in a discriminating way that avoids simple options and that appreciates the important ways the social-scientific disciplines require their own approach. Open the Social Sciences in particular also contains detailed and wise advice as to how the contemporary social sciences should proceed if they want to fulfill their ambition to explain human social behavior in a scientific way. Key Words: science • social science • scientific method • unity of the sciences • reductionism • explanation • interpretation • complexity theory.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: pos.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: pos.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The social, behavioral, and a good chunk of the biological sciences concern the nature of individual agency, where our paradigm for an individual is a human being. Theories of economic behavior, of mental function and dysfunction, and of ontogenetic development, for example, are theories of how such individuals act, and of what internal and external factors are determinative of that action. Such theories construe individuals in distinctive ways.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... We propose a general framework for integrating theory and empiricism in human evolutionary ecology. We specifically emphasize the joint use of stochastic nonlinear dynamics and information theory. To illustrate critical ideas associated with historical contingency and complex dynamics, we review recent research on social preferences and social learning from behavioral economics. We additionally examine recent work on ecological approaches in history, the modeling of chaotic populations, and statistical application of information theory.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Peter Richerson, A prolegomenon to nonlinear empiricism in the human behavioral sciences
 Back
All discussions
Start a new thread
|
There are no threads in this forum |
Nothing in this forum yet.
