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The harms of ignoring the social nature of science

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Abstract

In this paper I argue that philosophers of science have an obligation to recognize and engage with the social nature of the sciences they assess if those sciences are morally relevant. Morally-relevant science is science that has the potential to risk harm to humans, non-humans, or the environment. My argument and the approach I develop are informed by an analysis of the philosophy of biology literature on the criticism of evolutionary psychology (EP), the study of the evolution of human psychology and behaviour. From this literature, I tease out two different methods of scientific critique. The first I call the “truth-detectional” approach. Those who take this approach are first and foremost concerned about the truth of EP claims as that truth can be determined by evidence. The second I call the “social-dimensional” approach. Those who take this approach talk about the production and truth of EP claims but within a social framework. On this account, the legitimacy and perceived legitimacy of EP claims are not separate from the institutional and social processes and values that lend to their production. I show that the truth-detectional approach risks harms to society and to the philosophy of science, but that the social-dimensional approach avoids these harms. Philosophers of science, therefore, should take a social-dimensional approach to the assessment of morally-relevant science.

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Notes

  1. Because the normative thrust of my argument imposes obligations on philosophers of science for how they ought to conduct their research, I limit the scope of my argument to morally-relevant science. When harm is at issue, the minimal obligations I impose are justified. However, when harm is not on the table, the obligations seem inappropriate.

  2. Despite Gould not being a philosopher by profession, I think these particular works of his are ideal for my analysis. Gould’s criticisms of EP are nothing short of philosophical and they are familiar works in philosophy of biology. What’s more, Gould has taken a more social-dimensional approach in other works (e.g., Gould 1996). This demonstrates nicely that the two approaches I discuss in this paper are methods and need not be identified with a particular philosopher’s whole corpus of work.

  3. Reverse engineering is when an evolutionary psychologist “attempts to reconstruct the mind’s design from an analysis of the problems the mind must have evolved to solve” (Buller 2005, p. 92).

  4. Historical evidence in the context of EP would require information about “the sort of environmental ‘problem’ [human] cognitive mechanisms are responding to, the phenotypic and genotypic variation present, the structure of the relevant social groups, the gene flow between them, and other population parameters” (Richardson 2007, p. 84).

  5. However, see Douglas (2013) who marks a distinction between “cognitive” and “epistemic” values.

  6. On this he mentions Thornhill and Palmer (2001) theory of rape and how some see it to justify rape and “give support to rapists” (36).

  7. Psychology journals include: Personality Processes and Individual Differences,Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Interdisciplinary journals include: Human Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

  8. For example, one or more of the four largest EP labs in the United States (i.e., Evolutionary Psychology Lab, co-directed by Todd A. Shackelford & Viviana A. Weeks-Shackelford; The Buss Lab, directed by David Buss; Center for Evolutionary Psychology, co-directed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby; Evolution and Human Behaviour Laboratory, directed by Michael McCullough) have received funding for their research from, among others, the following major agencies: National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Hogg Foundation, Gordon P. Getty Trust, John Templeton Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, The Fetzer Institute.

  9. Thank you very much to an anonymous reviewer for their insights on this discussion.

  10. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this particular worry.

  11. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out this particular challenge for the social-dimensional approach. It is in fact quite relevant to very near future work of mine in which I will be engaging sciences that are both epistemically more sophisticated and socially less harmful than evolutionary psychology.

  12. For discussions from philosophers who have dealt (in different ways) with this problem of balancing epistemic and social considerations in science analysis see, Brigandt (2015), Brown (2013), Douglas (2009), Kitcher (1985), Kourany (2010), Solomon (2001).

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Acknowledgements

Thank you very much to Carla Fehr, Ingo Brigandt, and members of the University of Waterloo FemLab (Alexandra Kraushaar, Kathryn Plaisance, Jamie Sewell, Jay Michaud, Sandra DeVries, Teresa Branch-Smith) for comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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    Sara Weaver

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Weaver, S. The harms of ignoring the social nature of science. Synthese 196, 355–375 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1479-8

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