Abstract
There are a variety of approaches to investigating human behavior as an object of scientific inquiry. This paper is about the puzzle provoked by the availability of apparently incompatible research approaches that nevertheless succeed in producing empirical results that have a confirmatory import. For monists, committed to there being one correct and comprehensive account of any given scientific phenomenon, this seems paradoxical. Pluralism seems better able to accommodate multiplicity of successful, but incompatible approaches, but it requires supplementation by pragmatism.
This talk was given as a keynote lecture at the Biological Explanations of Behavior Conference, Hannover, Germany, June 12-15, 2008. A revised, but similar, version was given as a keynote lecture at the Conference of the Society of Philosophy of Science in Practice, Minneapolis, MN, June, 2009. For more detailed discussion of the issues broached, readers are referred to my forthcoming monograph on understanding the sciences of behavior. I am grateful to the editors and to anonymous referees for constructive suggestion for revision of this manuscript.
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Notes
- 1.
Proximate and ultimate (or evolutionary) explanations are answers to different kinds of question (ontogenetic and phylogenetic, respectively) and so not susceptible to the kind of comparative analysis I am conducting.
- 2.
- 3.
Brunner, et al. (1993). Five members of the family exhibited extreme levels of violence, while nine others exhibited more moderate, but still higher levels of violence.
- 4.
I deliberately use the broad locution, “play a role in”, and avoid causal locutions such as “produce” as there are very different kinds of causal relation that can be investigated. And in the case of neurophysiology, there is a very live question as to whether what is investigated is causation or constitution.
- 5.
Coccaro, Gabriel, and Siever (1990).
- 6.
A distributed process being one that involves neuronal structures throughout the brain, while local ones are specific to a single region or even a single neuron.
- 7.
Luntz and Widom (1994).
- 8.
Lavigueur, Tremblay, and Saucier (1995).
- 9.
Longino (2001) and forthcoming.
- 10.
There is a certain amount of equivocation in the representation of conclusions from heritability studies, a slide from thinking about the genetic contribution to difference in a population in the expression of a trait to expression of a trait simpliciter.
- 11.
- 12.
Caspi, Sugden, and Moffitt (2003); Caspi and Moffitt (2006). About nine months after this talk was given in Hannover, Neil Risch, Kathleen Merikangas and colleagues published a meta-analysis casting doubt on the gene-depression connection that was one of the main empirical supports for the Caspi and Moffitt integrationist approach (Risch, Herrell, Lehner, et al. 2009).
- 13.
- 14.
See Longino (2006).
- 15.
- 16.
Longino (2002).
- 17.
For further discussion, see Longino (forthcoming).
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Longino, H. (2012). Knowledge for What? Monist, Pluralist, Pragmatist Approaches to the Sciences of Behavior. In: Plaisance, K., Reydon, T. (eds) Philosophy of Behavioral Biology. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 282. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1951-4_2
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