Why We Disagree about Human Nature is a tightly interwoven ten-chapter anthology of debates over the nature of and rationale for concepts of human nature drawing upon the fields of philosophy and psychology, biology and anthropology. Pervading the volume as an intellectual springboard for the vast majority of its contributors are two contrasting approaches. These seminal approaches are associated with the earlier work of the philosophers David Hull, notably his 1986 “modern classic ‘On Human Nature'” (1) and Edouard Machery, particularly his 2008 “nomological” account “A Plea for Human Nature” (which is further defended and modified in the first chapter (18-39)).

          What rapidly becomes evident is how the debate nowadays is tempered within the humanities and the sciences by a generation of theorists questioning yesteryear’s nature-nurture and body-mind distinctions by the belief that biological and socio-cultural dimensions attributable to homo sapiens and their development are fundamentally and interactively integrated. For all the variations involved, such integration is often postulated to have evolved through the continuous interplay of “niche” factors, be they environmentally animate or inanimate.

At the same time, readers will also realise how far biological theory still remains conceptually and practically influenced by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel just as cognitive theory has subsequently been by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotskii (e.g. 179, n. 16). This anthology can therefore be seen as capturing the efforts of its contributing philosophers of the sciences to (re)calibrate the relationship of the biological and the cognitive when debating what, if any, value can or should be assigned to conceptions of human nature and the degree to which scientific enquiry is driven by its institutionalized practices, if not by its over-arching concepts. However, owing to limits upon length, we shall principally focus our critical attention upon the pivotal use made of the first chapter by the argumentative trajectory carefully assembled by the editors of Why We Disagree about Human Nature.

I

The anthology employs the strategy of having Machery contribute its first chapter against which all others can, in practice, be assessed. Although Machery, during the decade succeeding his above-mentioned 2008 paper, attempted to counter objections to it, doubts have nonetheless persisted as the volume under examination reveals.

          Machery proposes a “nomological” conception of human nature as one, he believes, avoids an “essentialist” conception which aims to define a set of its necessary and sufficient criteria. Hence, he continues, human nature is better regarded as “the set of properties that humans tend to possess as a result of the evolution of their species” (18 & 19). This, in turn, explicitly implies that whatever characterizes human nature must be “typical” of humans and “must have evolved” (18) without any commitment to asserting that characteristics, properties, or traits possessed by humans are distinctively possessed by them: “no trait is essential to human beings qua human beings” so that a trait can at best only be “a contingent fact” (19). What distinguishes humans from other creatures is therefore to be “drawn in genealogical terms” (19). Human nature, for Machery, is “constituted by the outcomes of various causal (evolutionary) processes” (19) including those identifiable with ancestors of the human species. In the course of claiming how the nomological conception of human nature “fulfils a descriptive, explanatory, and limitative function” (20), Machery insists not only that “non-evolutionary schemas” are inappropriate means of developing causal explanations of human characteristics, but also, given their “long phylogeny” over scores of millennia, “they are likely to be insensitive to education and cultural factors” (21; cf. 30-31).

          At this point perhaps enough has been disclosed for readers to anticipate some of the concerns worrying other contributors to Why We Disagree about Human Nature. Two or three crucial concerns come immediately to mind:

(i)           How are we to assess what constitutes a “typical trait”?

(ii)          Is the applicability of an “evolutionary” framework precluded from the part played by the “cultural” dimension of humans (including the “educative”)?

(iii)         What does Machery mean by classifying his notion of human nature as “nomological”?

In the space available, we shall now pursue the first and second questions through the second and third chapters in turn. Next, we shall examine the last question which is not always at the forefront of every chapter before concluding with a further question those skeptical about human nature—notably those figuring in the sixth and seventh chapters—seem not to have fully engaged.

II

Grant Ramsey re-frames the issues of typical traits in his attempt to preserve the notion of human nature by distinguishing between an inventory of traits (a “bin”) and sets of relationships amongst traits (a “cluster”). The latter approach, which Ramsey identifies as a “gestalt shift” in our understanding (46), enables us to detect “patterns over life histories” of the species under examination (41). This contrast operates despite Machery allowing for traits being classificatory or dispositional, physiological or behavioral (e.g. 22-23). Why? Because Ramsey finds at least three persistent problems attending any attempt to divide human traits. First of all, there is the problem of splitting traits into “two mutually exclusive categories” of the evolutionary and the non-evolutionary (43). Secondly, there is the problem of classifying traits without ever taking account of “how one partitions traits” and why (44). Thirdly, there is the problem of knowing “how to categorize quantitative traits (…that take on a range of values) instead of qualitative traits (…an individual either possesses or does not),” and thereby making it virtually impossible, according to Ramsey, to account for the variability in, for example, human height without acknowledging “cultural (especially dietary) changes” (44).

          Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths, adopting a “developmental systems” and “niche construction” framework, confront the contentious issue of applying evolution to the cultural dimension of human nature. From their perspective, “patterns of similarity and difference

amongst human beings” need to comprehend “the plastic but not unstructured process of human development” that “reaches well out into the ‘environment'” (59). They consequently reject the “essentialist” underpinnings of Machery amongst others:

The vernacular idea of human nature from which so many philosophical analyses start….seeks to divide human characteristics into those imposed by the environment and those that stem from an inner nature, and embodies the assumption that the three characteristics of fixity, typicality, and teleology are strongly associated with one another because traits that stem from our inner nature have these three properties and traits imposed by the environment do not (61; cf. table 3.1).

Because the human “lineage has many possible developmental trajectories,” because the developmental process involves an intricate “matrix of genetic, epigenetic, and exogenetic resources” (68), the study of development in all its human diversity is complicated and cannot be summarised by simple slogans. Stotz and Griffiths, in the final analysis, see culture as deeply implicated in the evolution of our species; so much so that culture, for them, “is not only a part of human nature, but that our nature is culture” (69).  Our development, they remark, is “dependent on a rich developmental niche of interaction with parents and other conspecifics, and with physical and cognitive artefacts from tools to languages” (69).

          In many respects, the chapters which follow tease out the implications of the first three briefly discussed above. These range from Cecilia Heyes (76ff.) exploring the adaptive bases for learning amongst human infants and John Dupré (92ff.) tracing human organisms as collections of processes implying that no one developmental stage can be constitutive of being human; or, again, from Peter Richerson (145ff.) critiquing the modern emphasis upon presuming human nature had a pre-cultural phase before entering a culturally overlain period to Christina Toren (170ff.) disputing the distinction between nature and culture because, if it pointless to separate human nature from human culture, then it is equally pointless to contrast human culture with human nature.

The collection ends on an historical tack with Maria Kronfeldner investigating several reasons why its contributors constantly disagree about human nature. Although the methods, the contextual contrasts, and the very content of the concept and term “nature” have varied from the ancient Hellenes onwards, Kronfeldner finds that “nature” in the study of humans consistently has “the pragmatic function of demarcating expertise and excluding styles of inquiry (202). That, in a nutshell, is one crucial reason “why the concept is still with us” and why the concept can continue to be used “to exclude as relevant certain kinds of causal factors in a given context” (202).

III

Let us begin to conclude this review with the third of the three crucial concerns raised in response to Edouard Machery. Dubbing his enterprise as “nomological” suggests that Machery is aiming to formulate general regularities or laws that explain natural phenomena rather than disclosing logical necessities. Hence, his emphasizes that typical human traits are no more than contingent facts (19). At the same time, he fends off counter-arguments of Ramsey and Lewens amongst others (e.g. 26ff. & 35f.) by contrasting accidental generalizations they are prone to make from lawlike propositions upheld from a nomological perspective. It is a contrast respectively exemplified by, for instance, “All males in Haarlem are breathing” (at the time of making the statement) as against “All humans are (typically) creatures with a pair of lungs.” This nomological strategy, more technically speaking, appears to involve what might be construed as exceptionless generalizations that are multiply realizable—say, “Consciousness is manifested by attending [feeling] [imagining] [remembering] [speaking] [etc.]”—but do not contain terms referring to individuated or particular objects, persons, or places  (as is succinctly summarized by James Woodward (2014, §2.2) on “Scientific Explanation” (accessible at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/. That said, some readers of Why We Disagree about Human Nature might nevertheless want to know not only what theories or hypotheses are in debate, but why these theories or hypotheses are propounded through certain modes of argument and not others.

          Finally, readers may sense another question remains unanswered despite the richness of the terrain covered by so many of the contributors opposed to essentialist notions of human nature. In recognition of the genealogical and historical nature of our species, Kim Sterelny is willing to countenance the features of human nature as one of two abilities: “to speak and understand language” and “consciously and deliberately reason about the world beyond the limits of perception” (112). Such abilities, as even Machery himself concedes, need not be “strictly universal” nor “necessary and sufficient conditions for being a member of our species” (112 & 113). Consequently, for Sterelny, what set of traits should be included ultimately depends upon our “conception of the theoretical work a theory of human nature should do” (114). So, when probing the causal direction of the evolved and evolving nature of the human species, he upholds a “reciprocal influence” between communal environments and individual attributes in which, for example, “core cognitive” competencies are in large part scaffolded by “the social organization of the learning environment of young humans” (120). Such competencies, by which inculcated and imposed norms make their mark, are nested within other characteristics such as “technical capacities, language, religious and/or moral norms, our awareness of one another as thinking agents” (112-113).

          In a complementary manner, Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown claim that current notions of human nature, when attempting to fulfil “several functions simultaneously,” face mutually incompatible demands and hence “should be abandoned” (127).  Instead, a more “inclusive understanding of the human condition” is best realized as “the product of internal and external constructive processes operating over both developmental and evolutionary timescales” (127 & 140). Such processes are demonstrated by how each generation actively constructs “physical, developmental, and epistemological environments for [its] offspring” (132). At the same time, Laland and Brown contend that, because development is “not pre-programmed,” it is therefore “constructive” such that “[o]rganisms are not built from genetic ‘instructions’, but rather self-assemble using a broad variety of interdependent resources” (135). Alternatively expressed,

the evolutionary process has bootstrapped a series of ontogenetic exploratory and selective processes that confer enormous plasticity on human development (135).

          Yet what the foregoing leaves unexplored is why understanding homo sapiens as a minded species demands a mode of intelligibility that differs from purely scientific explanation. From whose perspective? From that of readers whose professional practice—be it medical, psychological, or pedagogical—is concerned with the health and development of the whole person. If humans have inherited the legacies of past generations, these legacies are not exhausted by the mere transmission of facts and skills. In the words of David Bakhurst in the September 2005 issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, humans, as Vygotskii understood, may well be “born ‘mere animals’,” but they “become persons as they attain a ‘second nature’, in the form of conceptual capacities and moral sensibilities” (2005, 467). These capacities and sensibilities are initiated and developed through “traditions of thought and action embodied in language and culture” (2005, 467).

 

© 2019 R.A. Goodrich

 

R.A. Goodrich is affiliated with the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and the A.D.I. Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edits the online refereed arts journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.