Integración causal en la explicación científica: Ciencia social con y sin psicología

Jordi Mundó

Resumen


Causality integration in scientific explanation: social science with and without psychology

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 those 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 may 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 new hypotheses. This cannot happen as long as folk psychology continues to set the research agenda. The goal of this article is to clarify how evolutionary psychology, by focusing on the evolved informationprocessing mechanisms that comprise the human mind, can supply the necessary causal connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and historians.

 

Key words: Evolutionary psychology, folk psychology, methodological behaviorism, cognitive science, philosophy of social science, causality.


Texto completo:

PDF

Referencias


Aristóteles, Política, trad. Julián María y María Araújo, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales.

Astington, J.W.; Harris, P.L.; Olson, D.R. (eds.) (1988), Developing Theories of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Atran, S. (1990), Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Atran, S. (2005), “Adaptationism for human cognition: Strong, spurious or weak?”, Mind & Language 20, 1: 39-67.

Baldwin, D.A.; Moses, L.J. (1996), “The ontogeny of social information gathering”, Child Development 67: 1915-1939.

Barkow, J.; Cosmides, L.; Tooby, J. (eds.) (1992), The Adapted Mind. Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995), Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bartsch, K.; Wellman, H.M. (1989), “Young children’s attribution of action to beliefs and desires”, Child Development 60: 946-964.

Berger, T; Luckmann (1967), The Social Construction of Reality, New York: Anchor Books.

Blaug, M. (1997), Economic Theory in Restrospect, 5th. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boyd, R.; Richerson, P.J. (1985), Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Boyer, P. (1994), The Naturalness of the Religious Ideas. A Cognitive Theory of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brown, D.E. (1991), Human Universals, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Brown, D.E. (1999), “Human nature and history,” History and Theory 38, 4: 138-157.

Butos, W. N. (2003), “Knowledge questions: Hayek, Keynes and beyond,” The Review of Austrian Economics 16, 4: 291-307.

Carey, S. (1985), “Constraints on semantic development,” in J. Mehler y R. Fox (eds.), Neonate Cognition, Hilldale: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 391-398.

Carey, S.; Gelman, R. (eds.) (1991), The Epigenesis of Mind, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Carruthers, P.; Chamberlain, A. (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind. Modularity, Language and Meta-cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L.; Feldman, M.W. (1981), Cultural Transmision and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chomsky, N. (1959), “Review of Skinner’s verbal behavior,” Language 35: 26-58. Chomsky, N. (1975), Proceso contra Skinner, Barcelona: Anagrama.

Churchland, P. (1991), “Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes,” in R. Boyd, Ph. Gasper y J.D. Trout (eds.), The Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/ The MIT Press, pp. 615-630.

Cosmides, L; Tooby, J. (1994a), “Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: Toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science,” Cognition 50: 41-77.

Cosmides, L.; Tooby, J. (1994b), “Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization,” in L.A. Hirschfeld y S.A. Gelman (1994), Mapping the Mind. Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, pp. 85-116.

Cummins, R. (1975), “Functional analysis,” Journal of Philosophy 72.

Dawkins. R. (1976), The Selfish Gene, New York: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (1986), The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin.

Dennett, D. (1981), “Skinner skinned,” en Brainstorms. Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Brighton: The Harvester Press, pp. 53-70.

Dennett, D. (1987), The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Dennett, D. (1991), “Real patterns,” Journal of Philosophy 88, 1: 27-51.

Dennett, D. (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Evolution and the Meaning of Life, New York: Simon & Shuster.

Domènech, A. (2002), “Algunos enigmas de la racionalidad económica”, en J.A. Díez Calzada (ed.), Los límites de la globalización, Barcelona: Ariel, pp. 65-84.

Domènech, A. (2005), “Relativismo, filosofía y ciencias sociales”, en A. Estany (coord.), Filosofía de las ciencias, Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Madrid: Trotta.

Durham, W.H. (1991), Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1987/1895), Las reglas del método sociológico, trad. Antonio Ferrer, Madrid: Akal.

Elman, J.L.; Bates, E.A.; Johnson, M.H.; Karmiloff-Smith, A.; Parisi, D.; Plunkett, K. (1996), Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Flanagan, O. (1991), The Science of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (1983), The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (2000), The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Geary, D.; Huffman, K. (2002), “Brain and cognitive evolution: Forms of modularity and functions of mind,” Psychological Bulletin 128: 667-698.

Gehlen, A. (1966), Der Mensch: seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.

Gigerenzer, G. (1991), “From tools to theories: A heuristic discovery in cognitive psychology,” Psychological Review 98: 254-267.

Goldman, A., (1993), “The psychology of folk psychology,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15-28.

Hausman, D. M. (1992), The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hayek, F.A. (1973) “The place of Menger’s Grundsätze in the history of economic thought,” in J. R. Hicks and W. Weber (eds.), Carl Menger and the Austrian School of Economics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hempel, C. (1965), Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science, New York: The Free Press.

Hirschfeld, L.A. y Gelman, S.A. (1994), Mapping the Mind. Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horgan, T. and Woodward, J. (1985), “Folk psychology is here to stay,” Philosophical Review 94: 197-226.

Humphrey, N. (1987), The Inner Eye, London: Faber & Faber.

Janicki, M.G.; Krebs, D.L. (1998), “Evolutionary approaches to culture,” en Ch. Crawford y D.L. Krebs (eds.), Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992), Beyond Modularity. A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Keil, F.C. (1989), Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kitcher, Ph. (1985), Vaulting Ambition. Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Leslie, A.M. (1987), “Pretense and representation: The origins of ‘theory of mind’,” Psychological Review 94: 412-426.

Leslie, A.M. (1995), “A theory of agency,” in D. Sperber et al. (eds.), Causal Cognition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Malle, B.F.; Moses, L.J.; Baldwin, D.A. (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality. Foundations of Social Cognition, Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/MIT Press.

Markman (1989), Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Menger, C. (1981), The Principles of Economics. New York: New York University Press.

Mundó, J. (2001), “Filosofia i epistemologia de les ciències socials”, en (coord.), Filosofia i epistemologia de la ciència, Barcelona: Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, pp. 39-55.

Mundó, J. (2002), “El separatismo en la cultura científica”, L’Espill 11: 96-103.

Mundó, J. (2003), “Fundamentos psicológicos de la socialidad y la cultura humanas, y la importancia para su caracterización en otras especies”, Ludus Vitalis 19: 173-178.

Mundó, J.; Raventós, D. (2000), “Fundamentos cognitivo-evolucionarios de las ciencias sociales”, Revista Internacional de Sociología 25: 47-74.

Nagel, E. (1961), The Structure of Science. Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.

Olman, Ch.; Kersten, D. (2004), “Classification objects, ideal objects, and generative models,” Cognitive Science 28, 2: 227-239.

Perner, J. (1991), Understanding the Representational Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Petitt, Ph. (1993), The Common Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, S. (1997), How the Mind Works, New York: Norton.

Pinker, S. (2002), The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York: Viking.

Premack, D.; Premack, A.J. (1995), “Intention as psychological cause,” in D. Sperber et al. (eds.), Causal Cognition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Putnam, H. (1964), “Robots: Machines or artificially created life,” Journal of Philosophy 61: 21, p. 668-691.

Putnam, H. (1979), Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rabin, M. (1994), “Psychology and economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 36: 11-46.

Rachlin, H. (1970), Introduction to Modern Behaviorism, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Repacholi, B.M.; Gopnik, A. (1997), “Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-months-old,” Developmental Psychology 33: 12-21.

Rosch, E. (1978), Cognition and Categorization, Hilldale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rosch, E. (1997). “Psicología cognitiva”, en F. J. Varela y J.W. Hayward (eds.), Un puente entre dos miradas. Santiago de Chile: Dolmen Ediciones.

Rosenberg, A. (1981), Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Rosenberg, A. (1988), Philosophy of Social Science, Boulder: Westview Press.

Rosenberg, A. (1992), Economics. Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rudner, R.S. (1966), “Functionalism and other problems of teleological inquiry”, en Philosophy of Social Science, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Inc.

Sahlins, M.D. (1976a), The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sahlins, M.D. (1976b), Culture and Practical Reason, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Searle, J. (1997), La construcción social de la realidad, trad. Antoni Domènech, Barcelona: Paidós.

Skinner, B.F. (1953), Science and Human Behavior, New York: Free Press.

Skinner, B.F. (1974), About Behaviorism, London: Jonathan Cape.

Sober, E. (1985), “Methodological behaviorism, evolution, and game theory,” in J. H. Fetzer (ed.), Sociobiology and Epistemology, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Spelke, E.S. (1988), “The origins of physical knowledge,” in L. Weiskrantz (ed.), Thought Without Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 168-184.

Sperber, D. (1994), “The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations,” in Hirschfeld, L.A. y Gelman, S.A., Mapping the Mind. Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 39-67.

Sperber, D. (1996), Explaining Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sperber, D; Premack, D.; Premack, A. (eds.), Causal Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spuhler, J.N. (1959), The Evolution of Man’s Capacity for Culture, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Stich, S.; Nichols, S., (1992), “Folk psychology: Simulation or tacit theory?” Mind and Language 7: 35-71; reimpreso en M. Davies, M. y T. Stone (eds.), (1995), Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Taylor, C. (1964), Explanation of Behavior, New York: Prometheus Books.

Thaler, R. (1987), “The psychology of choice and the assumptions of economics,” reimpreso en (1991), Quasi Rational Economics, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Tooby, J.; Cosmides, L. (1992), “The psychological foundations of culture” in J. Barkow, L. Cosmides y J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind. Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Von Mises, L.(1981), Epistemological Problems of Economics, trad. George Reisman, New York: New York University Press.

Von Neumann, J.; Morgenstern, O. (1944), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wellman, H.M. (1990), The Child’s Theory of Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Wright, L. (1976). Teleological Explanations, Berekley: University of California Press.


Enlaces refback

  • No hay ningún enlace refback.


Revista semestral editada por el Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Políticos
y Sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano de la Secretaría de Educación Pública,
la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa y Edicions UIB de la Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Lombardo Toledano 51, Col. Ex-Hda. Guadalupe Chimalistac,
Del. Alvaro Obregón, C.P. 01050, México, D.F.
Tels. (5255) 5661-4679 y 5661-4987
Fax: (5255) 5661-1787