Philosophy, social science and human cognition: from folk psychology to evolutionary psychology

Abstract

In the social sciences there has been almost universal agreement that the descriptive categories that common sense has used since the dawn of history are the right ones. Folk psychology tells us that people do the things they do roughly because they want certain ends and believe these acts will help attain them. However, beliefs and desires may be causes, but we can never find descriptions of them independent enough from one another to enable us to frame laws about them that have much informative content or improvable predictive power. We should replace this explanatory system with one that «carves nature at the joints». Far from the misguided and failed behaviorist research program, social science has an opportunity to turn itself into a theoretically rigorous discipline in which a powerful set of theories organize observations and suggest focused new hypotheses. This cannot happen, however, as long as folk psychology continue to set the research agenda. The goal of this article is to clarify how evolutionary psychology, by focusing on the evolved information- processing mechanisms that comprise the human mind, supplies the necessary causal connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and historians.