Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality

469 Pages·2007·24.26 MB·English

by  William C. Wimsatt

Cartoon by Sydney Harris, Physics Today, February 1988. Courtesy of Sidney
Harris and ScienceCartoonsPlus.com.
Re-Engineering Philosophy
for Limited Beings
W
PIECEWISE APPROXIMATIONS TO REALITY
WILLIAM C. WIMSATT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2007
Copyright Cl 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wimsatt, William C.
Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings : piecewise approximations
to reality f William C. Wimsatt.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-01545-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-674-01545-2 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. I. Title.
B29.W498 2007
191--dc22 2006052988

To my generators and support-
past: my parents, Ruth and Bill Wimsatt
present: my partner in life, Barbara Horberg Wimsatt
future: our son, William Samuel Abell ("Upski") Wimsatt

Preface
In the early 1990s, when I finally decided it was time to put together the
papers that would become this volume, the tides of rationalism were
near their high-water mark. Game theory increasingly dominated eco
nomics and political science, and optimizers in economics were talking
to those in biology. Rationalism had been strong in philosophy for my
entire professional generation, beginning in the mid-1960s. Natu
ralism's hold seemed less certain. Realism seemed on the retreat, not
only within philosophy but also with the rise of science studies.
Now we see a growing and refreshing empiricism about many things
"philosophical," even rationality itself. Traditional idealizations seem
less satisfactory on all sides. New disciplines have emerged, intersecting
many of our knottiest problems of the biological and human sciences
those problems often called methodological or conceptual or philosoph
ical, and increasingly described as complex, in the senses of chapters 8,
9, and 10 of this volume. Behavioral decision theory has begun to have
its day. Gigerenzer, Hutchins, and others project a more heuristic, col
lective, and contextually imbedded image of our intellectual powers. An
explosion in the past decade of works on human biological, cognitive,
social, cultural, and above all collective evolution have made it only
natural to look for our human natures through a historically and so
cially informed multidisciplinary scientific perspective. The human sci
ences and the Darwinian sciences, cluster terms emerging in the past
decade, are both appropriately named and increasingly interpene
trating. Perhaps Herbert Simon and Donald Campbell's different but
viii · Preface
consilient evolutionary visions of our kind will come to pass {see more
on this below).
But there is also a lively antiscientism abroad opposing this-perhaps
largely in response to the excessive reductionism of the past generation.
Philosophers like John MacDowell see scientific perspectives on human
nature as too coarse, rigid, and insensitive to capture our intentional
worlds of mind and culture. Past materialisms have regularly promised
urban renewal of these neighborhoods to make room for the latest
seemingly spare materialism, bringing a bulldozer when a cultural li
aison mission was called for. This is not the form of integrative materi
alism now emerging. Scientific-cultural liaisons now blossom, and new
progress in all of the human and Darwinian sciences could result from
richer and more appreciative interdisciplinary interactions. Hopefully,
enough practitioners of traditional disciplines will recognize that it is
again time for new infusions for the health of all and will resist the
temptation to erect defensive conceptual trade barriers. The ironies of
the frontispiece simultaneously document the hubris of a too-simple
physics-inspired reductionism, and my commitment to "everything in
between." It is thus a singularly suitable way to begin this book. I thank
Sidney Harris for permission to use his inspired wry insights on the
human scientific condition.
The oldest of these chapters goes back more than 30 years; the
youngest, only a few months. It has been about 25 years since Lindsay
Waters suggested that I put a book of them together, and I'm happy
now to surrender my seniority as his longest-standing project though it
has evolved from a collection of papers to a more systematic work. He
has maintained an ongoing conversation and stream of suggestions
(readings as well as modulations) all along. For years I didn't have the
right mix, and others developed alongside. These are, I hope, the first of
more "right mixes" to come. This collection combines older papers,
newer ones (several never before published and written especially for
this volume), and substantial new introductory essays.
With the older papers (chapters 4-6 and 8-11) I have made only
minor stylistic revisions, removed old misprints, and occasionally
added new bibliographical references. ChapterS's section on group se
lection was reorganized to eliminate redundancies with Chapter 4.
These papers have aged well-often anticipating newer directions and
still relevant as they stand, though references and descriptions of other
positions are occasionally dated. When not central to the argument, I
have left them unchanged. I apply a naturalistically conceived ration-
Preface · ix
ality to the analysis of the complex world we live in, and to what kinds
of beings we are that we do so. I hope the collection has the right hooks
and balance to interest scientists and philosophers alike. It is a natura
listic and realist philosophy of science for limited beings studying a
much less limited world. It mines science for philosophical lessons more
commonly than the reverse. The key concepts here (robustness,
heuristic strategies, near-decomposability, levels of organization, mech
anistic explanation, and generative entrenchment) are applied to ex
plore the cognitive tools with which we approach the world and our
parts in it. Reductionism-the source of past and continuing threats of
assault from below on the human sciences and humanities-is both
target and resource, as much for its methodology as for its results. The
result is a softer, richer vision of our world and our place in it than
promised by both sides in the history of the warfare between men
talisms and materialisms. It is a more appropriate philosophy of sci
ence, I argue, than we have been given so far.
Acknowledgments are spread through the chapter endnotes. The new ma
terials (chapters 1-3, 7, most of 12, and 13; the part introductions; and
the appendixes) emerged during and between several "writing retreats." I
thank the staff of Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation Center at
Bellagio (in a warm, dry, beautiful, and amicable March 1997), the
Franke Humanities Center at Chicago (for another part of that year, and
of 2004-2005), and finally the staff and fellows of the National Humani
ties Center in Research Triangle Park of Raleigh-Durham, North Car
olina, for a glorious year in 2000-2001. Their catalyses were real, though
nominally directed toward other projects, now further along and better
than they would have been without their help. Some chapters benefited
from the support of the National Science Foundation and the System De
velopment Foundation, and my students, undergraduate and graduate,
played a continuing role as midwives and sounding boards, many even as
they developed their own careers. Particularly among these (in temporal
order) have been Bob Richardson, Bill Bechtel, Bob McCauley, Jim
Griesemer, Sahotra Sarkar, Jeffrey Schank, and Stuart Glennan. Schank
and Griesemer coauthored multiple papers (and Schank, software) with
me in the process, and were particularly productive for my own thought.
Deeply formative influences of Herbert Simon, Donald Campbell,
Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, and Frank Rosenblatt all began for
me in the mid-1960s, and have endured. Michael Wade's example and re-