In this valuable collection the authors are concerned with the
aspects of human psychology that make scientific enquiry possible. Given a
broad construal of science, to include technical innovations and experimental
method, the question is: What is it about the mind, its architecture, its
development and its cognitive processes, that promotes scientific thinking? The
attempt to provide an answer to this question is a cooperative enterprise that
involves psychologists, biologists, philosophers of mind and cognitive
scientists. The result of this first step towards the specification of the
cognitive basis of science will be of great interest to anyone who is
fascinated by the intellectual achievements of the human mind.

The collection is composed of four thematic sections. Part 1 is
dedicated to innateness, and more specifically to the question whether scientific
reasoning has an innate basis. The contributors are Carruthers, Mithen and
Atran. Part 2 is concerned with aspects of contemporary scientific cognition in
adults and children, and includes papers by Valley, Gopnik & Glymour,
Nersessian, Dunbar, Koslowski & Thompson, Evans and Hilton. In Part 3,
three authors, Thagard, Hookway and Kitcher, discuss the role of emotions in
the making of science. Part 4 explores the social dimension of science. The
contributors are Giere, Siegal, Harris and Faucher et al. In order to offer an
idea of the kind of issues discussed, and the variety of problems that
scientific reasoning poses, I shall briefly present here the main argument of
four very thought-provoking papers, one for each thematic part of the
collection.

In "The Roots of Scientific Reasoning" (Part 1, pp.73-95),
Peter Carruthers argues for the continuity of cognitive processes before and
after the emergence of experimental science. The paper starts with the
observation that the development of science is relatively recent (it has come
about in the last five centuries). On the basis of this observation one might
suggest that the emergence of science is due to a change in cognitive processes
rather than a change in socio-economic factors. Carruthers does not think that
this is the case and defends the continuity
thesis, that is, the idea that "there is a fundamental continuity
between the cognitive processes of scientists and those living in
pre-scientific cultures" (p.74). In order to defend this thesis, Carruthers
explores differences and similarities between the activities of scientists and
of hunters-gatherers. He comes to the conclusion that, while there are many
radical differences in belief between the two cultures, the same cognitive
processes underpin the activities of both scientists and hunters-gatherers. The
shared activity is the provision of theories for the explanation of events and
regularities in nature, where a good theory is characterised by accuracy,
simplicity, consistency, coherence, fruitfulness and explanatory scope.
According to Carruthers, the tracking made by hunters-gatherers involves the
provision of a theory for the purposes of explanation. Research in this
direction can have important repercussions on the innateness debate.

In "The Influence of Prior Belief on Scientific Thinking"
(Part 2, pp.193-210), Jonathan Evans attempts to account for an apparently
perplexing phenomenon. In order to test hypotheses and interpret evidence,
scientists need to be able to reason hypothetically and deductively. But when
psychologists devise experiments to test whether subjects (typically university
students, but also professionals and experts) can solve reasoning tasks, the
results show that the subjects suffer from systematic biases. How can our success
in the real world and our poor performance in experimental situations be
reconciled? Evans suggests that the reason why our performances in experimental
situations are so discouraging is that the tasks often are very abstract and in
order to offer the right solution to them, subjects need to prescind from a
context and ignore prior beliefs and experience. But human reasoning is much
more efficacious when background knowledge can be used to improve the
performance, like in real life tasks. As evidence for his hypothesis, Evans
reports some very interesting experimental results about the confirmation bias (the tendency to seek
confirmatory evidence for our prior beliefs) and the belief bias (the tendency to evaluate evidence in such a way as to
favour prior beliefs). Evans concludes that these are not always to be regarded
as ‘biases’, but attitudes that can be beneficial to the practice of science,
where the disconfirmation of hypotheses is otherwise guaranteed by the social
dimension of the research environment.
Though Evans contributes significantly to the literature on reasoning mistakes
in his discussion of the classic psychological experiments, his positive claims
about the use of ‘biases’ in science are still at the level of mere
speculation.

In Part 3, Paul Thagard’s paper, "The Passionate
Scientist" (pp.235-250), is a defence of the role of emotions in the
scientific activity. Thagard argues that emotions should not be seen as
antagonistic to reason, as in the classical accounts, but as essential to the
three aspects of scientific enquiry, (a) investigation, (b) discovery and (c)
justification. Thagard claims that decisions as to which topic to conduct one’s
research on are grounded on emotional responses rather than rational
calculations. Interest and happiness are strong motivational factors. Positive
emotions like pleasure and delight also follow a scientific discovery. The
discovery is seen as a great moment in which the scientist is rewarded for the
many efforts made in the previous years. These observations are not in the
least surprising, as Thagard concedes, and the most difficult task for him is
to show that emotions play a part in the context of justification, historically
regarded as the domain of rationality. He argues that justification is a matter
of coherence, and concerns "how everything fits together" (p.246).
Within this coherentist framework, considerations about elegance and beauty are
likely to be very significant in the attempt to lend support to one theory
rather than the other. Thagard does not develop his ideas about justification
and it is in my view a limitation of his account that he relies in his paper on
anecdotal evidence and on the use of emotion words by scientists describing the
different stages of their work.

Paul Harris is interested in determining the role of testimony in
the acquisition of knowledge. In his "What Do Children Learn from
Testimony" (Part 4, pp.316-334), he argues that the testimony of adults is
important in accounting for pre-school children’s knowledge of facts that are
not directly observable, such as the shape of the earth and the origin of
species. For these reasons, the view according to which the child is a little
independent scientist whose knowledge about the world accumulates via gathering
data and interpreting observed phenomena, seems to be misleading. In his very
stimulating paper, Harris concludes that the influence of adults on children’s
development is not just ampliative, that is, it does not simply supplement the
information that children already acquire on their own. The testimony of adults
allows children to get to know facts of which they could not have direct
experience. For instance, children can acquire not only scientific beliefs, but
metaphysical ones. Some of the religious beliefs they have about God require
them to suspend the biological and psychological constraints that they have
learnt to apply to humans, showing that the demarcation between science and
metaphysics appears at very early stages of our knowledge about the world.

This collection is the starting point of a
very exciting project and even the occasional limitations of the contributions
have the positive effect of opening new fields to empirical research in
psychology and biology. The results of further investigation will constrain
contemporary philosophical accounts of science and of the human mind.

© 2002 Lisa Bortolotti

Lisa Bortolotti studied philosophy
in Bologna (Italy), London and Oxford (UK) before starting her PhD at the
Australian National University in Canberra. Her main interests are in
philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, rationality, mental illness and
animal cognition.

Categories: Philosophical