Projects
Dissertation: Narrative Explanation in the Evolution of Human Cognition
Abstract
Why do some explanations seem to take the form of a narrative? And why should evolutionary theorists in particular have recently proposed narrative explanations for the evolution of human cognition, when ‘story-telling’ is a commonplace pejorative for evolutionary explanation? In recent work on human cognitive evolution, several biologists and philosophers have put forth hypotheses in which they attempt to synthesize knowledge from a broad range of disciplines into comprehensive narratives. In my dissertation, I focus on one question raised by this broad and interdisciplinary approach: is narrative explanation a distinct and important type of explanation? I argue for three theses to demonstrate that it is. I first develop a novel account of narrative explanation: narrative is the form that the causal explanation of some target must take when that target stands in an unstable relationship with the first relevant cause in its causal history. I then use this account to make sense of the way that theorists build narratives of the evolution of human cognition: they focus on the empirical justification for the beginning and the end of the narrative and identify the events in our evolutionary history that removed constraints on human cognitive evolution. Finally, I consider some of the difficulties inherent to this approach, despite its potential advantages. For example, narratives seem to invite speculation to fill missing causal steps. My dissertation shows that narrative hypotheses of human cognitive evolution are a fruitful case study for understanding narrative explanation generally, and conversely, that once these hypotheses are characterized and evaluated as narrative explanations, we can better understand this recent, promising approach to human cognitive evolution.
My supervisor is P. Kyle Stanford.
What would imaginary ancestors do?
manuscript and dissertation chapter
In this paper, I identify a novel challenge to reasoning about human cognitive evolution. Theorists engaged in producing a causal history of uniquely human psychology often implicitly or explicitly take the perspective of imaginary hominins to reason about a plausible evolutionary sequence. I argue that such speculations only appear plausible because we have employed our evolved cognitive capacities to decide what the imaginary hominin would think or do. Further, I argue that we are likely to continue making this kind of mistake, and so we must continuously contend with it, even in our best approaches to human cognitive evolution.
Causal selection in context: explaining gene centrism
There are two problems in the history and philosophy of genetics that seem to be related, but it is not yet clear just what that relationship is. One is the problem of causal selection, and the other is justifying gene centrism – the general approach of seeking genetic explanations. I argue that to understand the relationship between the two, we must consider explanatory targets far causally downstream from DNA. Philosophers have identified causal specificity as an intrinsic feature of genetic causes that makes them explanatorily relevant for very close downstream targets in the cellular environment of DNA. But when explaining targets far downstream, biologists sometimes select as explanatory causes that are genetic but not specific, and other times select causes that are specific but not genetic. This observation detaches causal specificity from causal selection, and in turn, from gene centrism. I argue further that specificity cannot justify gene centrism in virtue of its contribution to the utility of genes as tools. I propose instead that the persistence and scope of genetics is better explained by a variety of historical factors. My analysis illuminates two conclusions: first, the success of genetics is what explains the prevalence of specificity as a criterion of causal selection, and not vice versa as philosophers have previously argued. And second, the objective and pragmatic dimensions of causal selection are interdependent.
Value influence in causal selection in the social sciences
with Rebecca Korf (UC, Irvine & Whitworth University)
In this paper, we present a novel avenue for value influence in the scientific process: in principled causal selection: the decisions that scientists make to emphasize some causes of an outcome as explanatory, while backgrounding others as irrelevant. Especially in the social sciences, scientists must compare the explanatory contributions of individual actions to those of social structural constraints. Some philosophers have argued that such decisions are always based on sociocultural values. Others have given accounts of the causal properties of social structural constraints and argued that the strength of the constraint can be used to determine its explanatory relevance, thus avoiding any capricious decisions between the relevance of individual actions and social structures. We argue in contrast that the assessment of the strength of a causal constraint in this context is value-laden in a different way: it depends upon what we think are reasonable options for individuals. We demonstrate this through a toy example and by application to explanations of the gender wage gap. We situate this avenue for value influence within the literatures of values in science and causal explanation. We conclude that sociocultural values can influence the production of scientific explanations even when scientists are applying an apparently epistemic principle of causal selection.
Causal properties of narrative explanations tell us what they are and where we’ll find them
manuscript and dissertation chapter
Some scientists produce explanations that seem to have a story-like, or narrative form. Such explanations are especially prominent in the historical sciences, including evolutionary history. To achieve an understanding of explanatory practice in historical science as well as a fuller understanding of the diversity of explanatory practices across the sciences, philosophers of science have proposed accounts of narrative explanation that seek to identify their unique explanatory features. However, such accounts neglect or misidentify the features that distinguish mere narratives from narrative explanations, and narrative explanations from other causal explanations. In this paper, I propose a novel account of narrative explanation that situates it within an interventionist account of causal explanation. Using my account, I propose three dimensions along which narrative explanations can be evaluated and draw several consequences for outstanding disagreements in the literature on narrative explanations. Ultimately, my account clarifies and justifies narrative explanation as a legitimate and distinct form of explanation.