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Saturday, June 27, 2009
Ev Psych on the Ropes?
No less a figure than David Brooks has declared that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek.” Evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson rushes to the defense in the Huffington Post (worth reading, more so than the take-downs).
Is this the beginning of the end?
I’m not inclined to assign any great importance to superficial journalistic take-downs of evolutionary psychology than I do to journalistic take-downs of Theory, though I’m not a devotee of either intellectual constellation. But I do think the study of psychology has changed in the last three for four decades, and irreversibly so. One aspect of the change is associated with the phrase “cognitive science” while “evolutionary psychology” signals another aspect. The former reflects the influence of computation as a metaphor and model for mental processes while that latter weds the former to a biological base. The lines between the two are not clear.
In 1978 I filed a disseration on “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.” Since cognitive science was a rather new development at that time – the term itself was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in 1973 – I devoted a chapter to explaining what cognitive science was. My account was necessarily idiosyncratic as cognitive science has never been more than a loosely associated congerie of themes and interests ultimately impelled by the idea of computation. I argued that cognitive science was about investigating a five-way correspondence between: 1) computational mechanisms, 2) behavior, 3) neuroanatomy and physiology, 4) ontogeny, and 5) phylogeny. Cognitive science, in fact, has tended to focus on 1 & 2 while evolutionary psychology has been concerned with 2 & 5. Both recognize the importance of 3 and, to a lesser extent, 4. I have no idea when we will have the psychology we need, one that is well-integrated across all 5 (for a very preliminary sketch of such a psychology, look here).
Comments
Is this the beginning of the end? I hope not, since I’m still waiting for ev psych properly to begin, or at least to begin providing things genuinely useful to literary study. Sounds like you’re waiting for the same thing ("the psychology we need").
I’m not waiting on evpsych at all. I’m getting on with it (e.g. on “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"), as I have for years (e.g. Cognitive Science and Literary Semantics, MLN, 91: 952-982, 1976).
If you’re at all interested, Joseph Carroll discusses the adaptive function of literature at a blog sponsored by the National Humanities Center. He’s quizzed by Ellen Dissanayake, Robert Storey, Brian Boyd, myself, and others.