Organism, Evolution, and the Social Environment in American Philosophy

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This project is to support research for a book on the American pragmatists and late-nineteenth-century biology. The researcher is building an argument to show that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. He is drawing from both published writings from the period as well as extensive archival evidence to make his case. The main potential benefit to society of this project is to change the conversation about the relationship between biology and the social world. The current conversation about this relationship is dominated by socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists, whose work has been roundly criticized by philosophers of science. Pragmatism provides an alternative model: Although we are, fundamentally, organisms modifying and being modified by our environments, in the contexts of science, ethics, and education, the environments that matter are social, and thus it is social science rather than biology that bears directly on these contexts. Technical Summary This research project will demonstrate that we cannot fully understand pragmatism and its influence without understanding its connection to biology. For example, the pragmatists used the dichotomy of "organism and environment" as an abstract framing device, applying it in logic, ethics, and even aesthetics. This organism-environment framework brought together biology, philosophy, and the social sciences, resulting in pioneering work such as that of W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which argued that many of the problems of the black community in Philadelphia were due to their social environment. The pragmatist philosophers were influential across a range of fields, from education to sociology. William James, after opening the first United States laboratory devoted to the teaching of psychology at Harvard, published one of the discipline's most influential textbooks; John Dewey, an outspoken champion of progressive education, founded what is now known as the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago; George Herbert Mead, one of the fathers of social psychology, motivated the sociological approach of symbolic interactionism. By revealing its roots in nineteenth-century biology, this project promises to transform our understanding of American pragmatism, and to enhance our understanding of the critical role of social environments.