What Moves Us? Unifying the biology of human behavior

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

SES 0321875 Stephen Downes, University of Utah "What Moves Us? Unifying the Biology of Human Behavior" Humans are animals and much of their behavior invites biological explanation. Such explanations will ultimately form an important part of self-understanding. The number of distinct approaches to the biology of human behavior has dramatically increased but the presupposition that a unified approach is possible still guides researchers. This situation introduces the need for a detailed examination of the biology of human behavior by philosophers of science. This proposal is to undertake such an examination. Behavioral ecologists, behavioral geneticists, evolutionary psychologists and a large range of other researchers propose a wide variety of causal mechanisms that they take to underlie human behavior. A careful articulation of this wide range of causal mechanisms is an important component of the bigger task of providing a viable biologically based account of human behavior. Currently, there is no adequate overarching causal model that captures all the claims in the various disciplines in the biology of human behavior and such an overarching model would add credibility to the idea that all the various research traditions in human behavioral biology are engaged in a unified endeavor. The proposal has three main aims: 1. To propose and defend a causal framework that is adequate to the task of unifying biological approaches to human behavior. 2. To present detailed arguments showing that appeals to folk psychology as an encompassing explanatory framework for human behavior are undermined by work in biology. 3. To provide an account of introspection that acknowledges the causal power of the unconscious mechanisms proposed by biologists of human behavior while explaining our lack of introspective access to these mechanisms. The project will contribute to both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. As a result, the intended audience is philosophers in these fields but also includes anthropologists, biologists, psychologists and sociobiologists, all of whom have a stake in understanding the causal framework underlying their research. The approach involves taking the details of various biological approaches seriously with the aim of drawing scientists into the philosophical discussion. The proposed book will continue the discussion about the potential integration of the various biological approaches to human behavior begun by researchers in numerous fields. A wide range of critics of the biology of human behavior target sociobiology and argue that sociobiologists embrace an untenable genetic determinism. One of the aims of the proposed project is to present such critics with an accurate assessment of the claims of researchers in the biology of human behavior. It will reveal that while it may be fair to level a carefully circumscribed charge of genetic determinism at a few researchers, most biologists of human behavior are not genetic determinists. Further, much critical discussion of sociobiology and other biological approaches to explaining behavior has an ethical dimension. Although the proposed project has no explicit ethical component, the research is relevant to work in ethics to the extent that a clear account of the wide range of causal claims made by various biologists of behavior may provide a useful starting point for ethical consideration of this research. As a result the project is relevant to broad based interdisciplinary discussions of the role of biology in human understanding.