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.

In this paper I will propose and defend a view of rationality which bears on three important issues in the philosophy of the social sciences. First, there is the issue of the nature of the principle of rationality in the social sciences. When the principle of rationality is formulated as an interesting empirical generalization, it seems false; but when the principle of rationality is formulated in a way which is clearly defensible and true, it seems trivially tautologous ([A],pp. 172-178). Secondly, there is the issue of the criteria for a rational action. When the criteria for a rational action are made relative to a culture, there is an implausibly large number of standards for judging rationality; but when the criteria for a rational action are not made relative to a culture, there is an implausibly small number of rational actions ([5], pp. 94-111).

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.

My aim in this necessarily compact paper is to sketch a philosophical defense of the kind of position assumed by the later Kroeber, when he wrote:

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.

It has become commonplace to claim that a scientific revolution has taken place in linguistics as a result of Noam Chomsky's contributions to the theories of syntax, linguistic metatheory and the philosophy of mind. Although the label ‘revolutionary’ was applied to these developments almost from the start (cf., [19], p. 375), the cliche has also been encouraged by the appearance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the early sixties at about the same time that the theory of transformational-generative grammar (hereafter abbreviated TG) was consolidating its position as the dominant school of linguistics and attracting the attention of the wider intellectual and scientific community. Because of this coincidence of currency, it was perhaps inevitable that many of those who were aware of the developments which had been taking place in linguistics would find themselves reading Chomsky's revolution into the pages of Kuhn's book.

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 philosophical literature is heavy with discussions of the logical structure of various proposed schema of functional explanation (most of which are modifications of Hempel's schema [7]) but it is very light on detailed analysis of the way in which these schema actually work or the way in which they apply to the instances in which functional explanations are used by scientists. These papers use statements by scientists ascribing particular functions to particular traits, along with intuitions about the way in which ‘function’ is used in ordinary language, to ascertain the referents of the term and thus to determine the class of uses against which any schema should be tested; but such examples only show whether the schema under discussion refer to the same things as those the scientists’ refer to; they do not show whether the logical structure of the schema really captures the logical structure underlying the scientists’ use.

A scientific explanation is prima facie micro-reductive if the explanans refers to the behavior or properties of the micro-parts of something mentioned in the explanandum. Entity x is appropriately regarded as a micro-part of y whenever the following individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions are satisfied:

1. (i) x is spatio-temporally contained in y

2. (ii) for any other part of y, either

   1. a) x is spatio-temporally discrete from it, or

   2. b) x and it are assigned to different “levels”, such that parts from only one level are used in any given micro-explanation,

3. (iii) x and y. share at least one quantitative, additive property such that

   1. a) the amount of this property attributed to x is less than the amount attributed to y, and

   2. b) the former amount arithmetically contributes to the latter.

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.

The issue of the admissibility into scientific discourse of teleological terms such as ‘function', ‘goal-direction, ‘purpose’ and ‘goal’ has not received widespread attention in recent years. In a provocative book, On Purposeful Systems, Ackoff and Emery claim that “the lack of more recent debate seems…no more than scholarly collusion in agreeing not to raise embarrassing questions” ([11], p. 15). Most of those who have attended to teleological problems have attempted to show that these teleological terms are eliminable in favor of non-teleological terms. ‘Function’ has been analyzed in this manner by Nissen [12], Nagel [11], Canfield [6], Hempel [8] et al. ‘Goal-direction’ and ‘purpose’ have been given similar treatment by Braithwaite [4], Nagel [11], Sommerhoff [21][22], inter alia. Notable exceptions to these reductionist analyses occur in the works of C. Taylor [23] and Wright [27].

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.

Much has been written on the 1905 paper in which Einstein founded the special theory of relativity, his justly famous “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” [4]. In it he innovatively defined the simultaneity of events at two distant points by imagining a light signal to be sent from one point to the other and back. In effect he defined the midpoint of the time interval between the signal's emission and return at one point to be simultaneous with its reflection at the other. And a large fraction of the writing about this paper (e.g., [19], [20], [3], [12]) has been concerned to show that, without denying any physical fact, he could have chosen any other point in the interval and thereby given an equally satisfactory alternative definition.