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Are there Psychological Species?

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Abstract

A common reaction to functional diversity is to group entities into clusters that are functionally similar. I argue here that people are diverse with respect to reasoning-related processes, and that these processes satisfy the basic requirements for evolving entities: they are heritable, mutable, and subject to selective pressures. I propose a metric to quantify functional difference and show how this can be used to place psychological processes into a structure akin to a phylogenetic or evolutionary tree. Three species concepts are repurposed from biology and used to understand relationships in that tree.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Neuberger Hall, Portland State University, PO Box 751, Portland, OR, 97207-0751, USA

    Joshua Fost

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  1. Joshua Fost
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Correspondence to Joshua Fost.

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Fost, J. Are there Psychological Species?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 293–315 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0227-y

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