Many of you know that there have been some dramatic theoretical changes in evolutionary biology during the past decade, and that sharp controversies have generated over whether or not, and how, they might be useful in our efforts to understand human behavior. It seems appropriate that these questions should be addressed at a meeting of philosophers of science.

Those of you who are aware of the controversies may agree that they have not always clarified the issues — at least not to a degree commensurate with the intensity of the feelings aroused. The word socioblology, for example, could have become simply a label for a new and broad interest in evolutionary approaches to social behavior. Instead, almost exactly like a predecessor, ethology, it has become associated with a concept of naive and intolerable determinism, and sometimes with only a few statements by one man about the genetic background of behavior.

Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection is an extremely powerful explanatory device. For its rigorous application to any phenomenon it requires only that some form of variation in the manifestation of the phenomenon exists, that the variations can persist in time, and that the properties of the variants cause them to have different average persistence times. So, for example, one could make a Darwinian explanation of the frequency of different sorts of rocks. There is variation in the hardness of rocks, they persist in time and indeed are being formed anew, and the harder rocks are more “adapted” to survive the weathering and erosion of wind and water. A similar story can be told about political parties, rumors, jokes, stars and discarded soft drink containers.

Sociobiology is a relatively recent effort at the synthesis of the fields of anthropology, ethology, and evolutionary biology. The structure of the present commentary is to present briefly the aim of Sociobiology in its own view, and to state how it formulates and attempts to solve its own designated problems. Then I attempt to characterize the adequacy of the presuppositions which a narrow form of Sociobiology seems to make, and the consequences of abandoning those presuppositions. Further, I shall try to characterize the core difficulties in assessing the ways in which genes determine behavior, for, as will soon emerge, this is central to the Sociobiologist's program. An analysis of those difficulties helps counter cavalier criticisms of Sociobiology, and begins to suggest some of the means to surmount the methodological difficulties which impede this important scientific effort.

The public image of science is that of an enterprise of dispassionate, cool objectivity: something involving sober, emotion-free, white-coated people, as they battle collectively to wrest secrets from the stubborn universe. Nor is this an image entirely unacceptable to scientists themselves. Witness, for example, the great fondness they have for Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science, with its scenario of men of science ruthlessly discarding favoured brain-children in the face of ugly but falsifying facts. Even biologists avidly swallow and regurgitate this picture, despite the fact that Popper calmly tells them that their most important theory is but a collection of half-baked truisms.

However, as historians of science know only too well, much of the actual activity of science descends right down to (metaphorical) bare-knuckle fighting of the most bloody kind.

The question before us is hard to get a handle on, or so I have found. For one thing, philosophy of science has been for almost half a century a growing industry, by now indeed a far flung empire, with its national and international organizations, its subsidiaries, its power struggles, its captains of industry, its apprentices and rising young executives. You name it, we've got it! Philosophy of medicine, on the other hand, though growing fast, largely, I fear, for practical rather than intellectual reasons, is a late comer. There isn't as much of it and there hasn't been time to develop the schisms that really make an academic discipline look as if it's doing something. For philosophy of medicine to instruct philosophy of science, therefore, seems a little like the corner grocer's telling General Foods how to run their business.

As a part of a symposium on philosophy and medicine in May, 1974, Jerome Shaffer, Marx Wartofsky, and Edmund Pellegrino engaged in a discussion concerning the possibility of a philosophy of medicine. In his remarks, Shaffer argued that what has gone under the term ‘philosophy of medicine’ properly belongs within the philosophy of science, moral philosophy, and, perhaps, the philosophy of mind, and hence, that “there is nothing left for the Philosophy of Medicine to do” ([36], p. 218). Shaffer wanted to debunk the thesis that there are issues such as the status of concepts of health or disease which are unique to medicine and which would, therefore, constitute a special conceptual domain for a philosophy of medicine. According to Shaffer, “What for an organism is normal and abnormal, well-formed and malformed, healthy and unhealthy, non-pathological and physiological … [is] part and parcel of the theory and laws of biology”([36], p. 216).

The philosophy of medicine has been granted a temporary visiting pass to the hallowed halls of the philosophy of science. The visitor is bound by rules, of course: e.g., visiting hours must not interfere with the working hours of the staff; proper decorum must be observed at all times—no loud or disturbing noises are allowed; above all, no kibitzing!

Such cautions, I would agree, are most appropriate. For the visitor is obstreporous, ill-mannered and even subversive. Moreover, the visitor has a history of being recalcitrant to the imposition of laws, and can't be trusted to abide by the house rules. Therefore, one should be wary of such a guest in the house of philosophy of science. For though its halls are hallowed, we have discovered that its walls are hollowed, and may not long continue to bear the weight put upon them.

How could philosophy of medicine have any particular relevance for the philosophy of science, one might wonder. Either medical science is like other sciences or it is not. If it is like them, if (or to the extent that) it is not unique in the features it possesses, then attention to it is unnecessary. If (or to the extent that) it is unique in the features it possesses, then it is irrelevant to an account of science in general. Surely what is wrong with this way of putting the matter is that the differences between the medical and other sciences are matters of degree rather than kind.

Medical science is distinctive as a theoretical science in prominantly displaying certain features which, while possessed to some degree by all sciences, were much easier to overlook when we took physics, or even just classical mechanics, as our prime example of science.

I take it that the original issue of this symposium is implicit rather than explicit in the title. As expressed by one of the arrangers of the symposium, it was this: “Despite a growing interest in philosophy of technology, many philosophers of science doubt that there are any very interesting philosophical issues generated by technology as opposed to science.”

While I share the concern here — much that has been written on technology, even by philosophers, is of dubious merit — I have been asked to present my views, I am sure, as an advocate of philosophy of technology. And I gladly accept the challenge. I feel that worthwhile work has been done, especially in the last ten years, and even more strongly that worthwhile work needs to be done — and from many perspectives. I turn to the need first.

Headline, 20th July, 1976: VIKING I LANDS ON MARS. Certainly a triumph of space technology. But philosophically significant? Doubtful, but then we should not look for philosophy in material objects other than human brains. If we look for philosophy at the right spots in the technological process we are bound to find some, for there is philosophy in or behind every piece of human knowledge and in or behind every step of rational action.

We shall find philosophy, for instance, in the policy making that ended up in the decision to build and send off Viking I, as well as in the technological research that went into the implementation of that decision—and I am using the term ‘philosophy’ in its technical acceptation not in the popular one. Indeed one of the assumptions in planning the Viking I venture was that there might be life on Mars after all.

Small differences can be very significant; this is as true of science and technology as it is with the sexes. To a first approximation, science and technology are strikingly similar; both deal with the world of matter and energy, and they deal with it in rather similar ways. Moreover, since the Renaissance science and technology have been growing closer to one another, in methods, organization and even in self-identification. Thus, there are some contexts in which it is quite proper to treat science and technology as the same. And this is valid in precisely the same sense that it is correct, in some contexts, to treat men and women as the same. But it is clearly fallacious to treat the sexes as identical in all respects. The same applies to science and technology.

One is tempted to begin with the infuriating philosophical ploy, “It all depends upon what you mean by ‘philosophy’ and by ‘technology’.” Those two words are in fact used in such fluctuating, imprecise, and implicitly controversial ways, that I am uncertain about the topic of this discussion. On being asked by an interviewer whether he minded answering questions, a great man said “No, I don't mind. If I can't answer a question, I shall give you an answer to some other question.” In this spirit, one might substitute for the question assigned to us the following one: “Can anybody identified as a ‘philosopher’ hope to contribute to understanding, and perhaps ultimately improving, whatever it is that people refer to as ‘Technology’?” In trying to answer this question, I shall outline my own conception of the tasks of a useful philosophy of technology.

There is not space to offer detailed comments on each of four papers ([1],[2],[3],[4]). Nor does it seem fruitful to create a potpourri by commenting individually on one or two points from each. Instead I will attempt to develop one issue of general significance, an issue which is raised by all of the papers, though not explicitly discussed in any. Comments on points raised by the contributors will be woven in where they are relevant.

Anyone unacquainted with recent philosophy and philosophy of science might find it strange that the program of the Philosophy of Science Association for 1976 should include a symposium with the title: Are There Any Philosophically Interesting Questions in Technology?

Around 1932 Carnap's philosophical development reached a point of equilibrium from which he would no longer depart significantly. The basic items of the conception of knowledge which he came to endorse at that time were three: a variety of reductionistic empiricism which he had illustrated in the Aufbau; a rejection of standard correspondence theories of truth (together with what looked like an endorsement of coherentism); and a syntactical understanding of the nature of philosophical activities. To many philosophers, even those whom Carnap considered his teachers or his allies, this set of views seemed absurd and incoherent. Russell saw in them a neo-neo-Platonism, inspired by a superstitious awe of language ([27], pp. 21, 141;, Schlick saw in them the irony of extreme rationalism stemming from extreme empiricism ([28], p. 69); and some Polish philosophers said they were “too sober” to share Carnap's views ([22], p. 233).

Stephen Toulmin, in assessing the legacy of logical positivism, remarked: “Yet, even though we slay our intellectual parents, we cannot help but inherit from them…. While many of us whose philosophical careers began after 1946 reject the positivism of our forebears, it would be presumptuous for us to deny our inheritance entirely. At the very least, we share with our analytic predecessors a common stock of questions and problems about whose answers and solutions we disagree” ([28], p. 51).

In biological evolution organisms cannot choose which genes to retain, nor can they strive to introduce particular new genes. However, we, as philosophers, can choose which things we wish to inherit from our intellectual parents and which things we wish to eliminate as nonadaptive in our current environment.

This paper is a reaction to two themes in recent history and philosophy of science. The first is the revival in philosophy of language of interest in truth and meaning, which relates to problems long discussed in philosophy of science. My tentative conclusion here is that tools are now available for the solution of these traditional problems, but that the detailed discussion by philosophers of language tends to by-pass philosophy of science, chiefly because it does not take sufficiently seriously questions about truth and meaning in theories and above all the question of radical theory change. A second theme, which is more implicit than explicit in this paper, concerns the fashionable tendency in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science for discussing philosophical problems in terms of case histories. These discussions have been motivated by the desire to avoid the threat of relativism and to restore rationality to theoretical science.

Every inquiry, or at least every inquiry that aims at knowledge, has a subject-matter - that which the inquiry is about, which is the object or set of objects studied. Let us, for the sake of brevity, and without further analysis for the present, call the set of things studied in an investigation the domain of the inquiry, and the particular things that make up the domain the items of the domain. (These “items” might, in particular inquiries, be spoken of as “objects,” “processes,” “behavior,” “facts,” or in still other ways; but such ways of speaking involve problems which, being irrelevant to present purposes, I wish to avoid by speaking more generally of “items.” Sometimes it is convenient to speak of classes of items as themselves items which are objects of investigation.)

1. (1) This paper is an excellent example of putting a cart before the horses. It was originally conceived as a reply to my critics, of whom there have been many, and, in particular, to my fellow symposiasts, whose careful exploration of and sympathetic disagreement with certain views of mine which are not inappropriately labeled ‘scientific realism’ have deserved a response which they have so far not received.

2. (2) Many of the criticisms could, I believe, be construed as matters of detail and countered by a myopic strategy of confessing error here and claiming misunderstanding there, all supported by a judicious use of self-quotation. And, in moderation, of course is not inappropriate. I have made mistakes and, I believe, I have been misunderstood, and where the relevant points are reasonably substantial they should be noted for the record.