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I'm David Petrozuski.

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I'm David Pinsov, and this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, Actual Evolutionary

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Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists.

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David, today we have another wonderful episode with a philosopher.

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Yes, I believe our second philosopher on the podcast.

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I love talking to philosophers, and we actually reiter reiterate this in the episode.

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Uh, just because I find that they have um uh really precise ways of communicating ideas and

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a really good handle on concepts and distinctions that I think is sorely lacking in in the

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social sciences.

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I think we need to be better about uh defining our terms precisely and making uh more

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fine-grained distinctions and being clear about what we mean.

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And I think philosophers are specialists in that task.

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I completely disagree, David.

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I think we should be more muddled and confused.

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I'm kidding.

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Um No, of course, yeah.

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Um and uh I think so.

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This is Lauren Ross, who's at UC Irvine, uh uh close to us, um,

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Southern California.

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And I think what is exciting about this conversation is I came across Lauren's work and

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work when I was working on my own struggles dealing with things like mechanisms and

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modules, um, and the whole confusion about the things that we're postulating as

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evolutionary scientists.

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Um, and it was very validating.

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And it was really great to have this conversation because I feel like it was a real-time

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example of uh here's a philosopher of science who's been thinking about these issues,

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not at all uh from the perspective of what we're doing, but then is hearing

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what we're doing and seeing commonalities with things that she's doing.

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And it was just very helpful.

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And I feel like there's much more to do.

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I I don't know how you feel, David, but I thought I felt like it was a very cathartic

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conversation to have to be seen and heard.

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Yes, totally.

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Yeah, we joked about how philosophers should be the therapists of scientists.

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Exactly.

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And yeah, this was a therapeutic conversation in that regard where we got to voice our

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frustrations with the uh conceptual confusions and difficulties in our field,

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and how we struggle to communicate our explanatory frameworks to people who are not

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familiar with that way of thinking and and what it means to you know be at a different

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level of analysis or a different level of explanation, uh how low we should go in terms of

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our explanations and our level of reduction.

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This was a really fun and enriching conversation.

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Yeah, and Lauren was really great about also articulating what is sort of state of the art

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for philosophy of science, including a very practical functional approach to well, what is

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a science explanation for?

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And if you, you know, not that there's a one-size or grand theory uh of this is what an

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explanation should be.

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So this was just great.

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Uh I I really had a good time.

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And hopefully, if you're a embattled evolutionary behavioral scientist or know someone who

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is, this will also be a uh therapeutic um episode for you.

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Yep.

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Enjoy.

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Lauren, thank you for being here.

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Um, I want to just uh start with a preface, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to

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have you on this podcast, which is about evolutionary behavioral sciences, is that a

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lot of us evolutionary psychologists or evolutionary anthropologists, we are

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working with colleagues who sometimes react to us talking about

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mechanisms in a way that makes them uh maybe to just put

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it bluntly, sort of grumpy or angry.

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Like I've literally heard people say, well, why do you have to talk about a mechanism for

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that?

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Or why do you have to postulate that there's some system that does something?

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Why can't you just say there's this experimental effect and I'm interested in that?

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And so this is all my preface.

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Um, oh we lost David, uh, but hopefully he'll come back.

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Uh that happens occasionally.

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But this is my uh preface of saying when I came across your work, I was really excited

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because you're doing um from a very different perspective, an idea of well, what is a

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mechanism, for example, what's a pathway?

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And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on was to sort of at least maybe buck us up

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or um uh oh David's internet cut out but we'll just we'll have him come back in a in

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a moment here.

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Um either buck us up or sort of help us understand from your perspective how did you get

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into this idea of mechanisms or pathways or causation in biology.

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Um maybe we can start with that and we can see to what extent what we're doing either needs

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correction or we can sort of feel somewhat vindicated, if that makes sense,

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as we are, as evolutionary behavioral scientists, sort of

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among empirical scientists, trying to postulate mechanisms, and

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we're often sort of crying in the wilderness about mechanisms, I would say, to put it in a

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way.

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Great.

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This is a nice concrete example of questions about mechanism

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and perhaps also the importance of it in science.

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So I'm a philosopher of science, and in particular, I work on causation and

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explanation, how scientists are providing explanations, the standards

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their explanations need to meet, or the standards that need to be met to have a good

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explanation.

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And then causation often shows up here because we think many explanations in science are

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causal, although, of course, we're often interested in varieties of explanation, some of

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which we might think are non-causal.

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But explanation is, you know, a very important project in science.

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We sometimes think of it as one of the most important projects where you're getting deep

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understanding of the world.

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And so mechanism is showing up in many cases where we're interested

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in A explanation or B causation.

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And they're both sort of related to each other because we often think that a main way

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we get explanations is by getting causal information about the world, or we're getting some

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kind of causal information about the brain, some causal structure, or the causes that

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matter for and that account for some kind of outcome of interest.

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So I think an important question to ask when

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mechanism is coming up is what's the point of this concept in science?

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What is it supposed to be doing for us?

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And what are we using it for?

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What is it what is it, you know, being used in order to do in terms

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of like scientific goals, but also if it's referring to causal systems in the

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world, you know, what types of causal systems is it referring to?

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So if we're interested in you know getting explanations, it makes sense that

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mechanism is coming up in those discussions.

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Um And I think it's important to focus

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on if it if we're interested in giving explanations, kind of

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how mechanisms are are serving that goal, and if they're giving us a causal explanation,

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essentially what kind of causal stuff in the world are they referring to.

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I guess some other points to note are that mechanism is a status term

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in the life sciences?

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And you often see this in the calls for grants that

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scientists are applying to, and you see it in the publication guidelines for journals.

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It's often suggested in many life sciences that if you want to get your work funded and

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published, you need to identify mechanisms and provide mechanistic insights.

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So part of what that shows is that it's a status term.

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um, the challenge is there isn't agreement on how to define a mechanism or

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what it means.

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And so this sort of connects to and nicely

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supports this situation you're referring to, where one scientist says they have a mechanism

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and the other scientist is sort of like, well, wait a minute, do you really?

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That's a debate that shows up in many different domains.

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And it's an important debate to discuss because

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mechanism is viewed as a standard in science.

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And if we don't have a clear notion of what it means, then part of what that implies is

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that the standard we're using isn't very clear and that there isn't kind of consensus on

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what that is.

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So if a journal is using that as their standard for publishing a paper, but you have two

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reviewers that have very different conceptions of mechanism in mind, um, you know, we're

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going to get different types of suggestions for whether this paper is

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meeting our standards or not.

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So Um so yeah, I think

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part of what this shows is the importance of asking this question

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of what are we interested in when we're bringing up the notion of mechanism and what do we

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want it to do and what do we think it is doing?

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And maybe that's a start for unpacking these debates and and topics in this

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space.

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Yeah, that's great.

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And one thing, I mean, so I can to have a dialogue about sort of what we do as evolutionary

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behavioral scientists, one thing I think many of us experience, and I can make this with a

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concrete example, is when we use mechanism, we're often doing sort of design stance

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level, like Dan Dennett's sort of design stance level.

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So we really want to say what a mechanism is, is not just a sequence of causation

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out in the world, but it's a packet of evolved systems at an abstract

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functionalist level.

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And I think many of us come up against an idea where people will use the word mechanism.

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And I would talk about like social psychologists would often do this.

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Well they'll say something like you know, the number of ice cream cones correlates with

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number of shark attacks.

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And then they'll say, well, the mechanism behind that.

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And when they say the mechanism behind that, they'll say, well, it's not a direct causal

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link.

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It's that when it's warmer out, there's more people at the beach, and therefore there's

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more people at the beach and it's hot and they have more ice cream, and also there's more

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people swimming.

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And that's the mechanism behind that correlation.

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And I think for many of us, uh evolutionary behavioral scientists, I at least, and

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David, you can correct me, I kind of feel like, oh, that's not a mechanism, that's a a

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causal pathway.

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I would prefer to use mechanism as in our case, something that

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was designed by natural selection and that um is in

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some sense a you can make predictions about what it's going to be like and

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how it's going to work in future situations, um, in a kind of functional

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teleological perspective.

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And um, so that's like an example concretely of one of the uh uh

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we find each other at cross purposes among us behavioral scientists talking about

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mechanism.

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I'm curious what your thoughts are on that example, um one way or the other.

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Oh yeah, absolutely.

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So part of what I think it reveals is the sense in

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which there are different types of causal systems and causes

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and systems in general that we're interested in referring to, studying,

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that we think matter in our work.

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And we need a way to systematically talk about what those are and

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to distinguish them.

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And those differences, you know, those differences matter for all sorts of

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reasons.

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And sometimes the term mechanism is getting in the way of our ability to do that well.

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So if we have a type of causal system that involves

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functional considerations and it's maybe goal-directed, that could be different from a

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causal system that's sort of mere maybe domino causation, where it's just a sequence of

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causes that in succession lead to an effect.

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We need a way to talk about the differences between those two types of causal systems.

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That's one example.

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This is a situation that you see just all across the

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sciences where there are different terms that are used to refer to different types of

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causes and different types of causal systems, right?

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A scientist will call a cause deterministic or probabilistic, it's more proximal or

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distal, it's operating on different timescales.

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That's those are distinctions with respect to a single cause, but causal systems also,

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if we call them pathways or cascades, or mechanisms, there's often a suggestion that they

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have additional features and that there's differences across those types of causal systems.

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So I would say part of what we see here is the sense in which there are causal

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varieties that scientists care about.

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And we need a way to clearly capture them and refer

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to them because the differences across those systems matter for the behaviors they produce,

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for how we study them.

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And right now, the term mechanism is getting in the way of our ability to do that.

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I mean, mechanism just means so many different things to different people.

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Sometimes in the same paper, you see it being used in different ways.

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And so sometimes I wonder if just setting that term aside and talking about

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types of causal systems or types of explanatory factors is a more helpful way

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to move forward because ultimately that's what we care about.

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I mean, we want explanations and we want to identify causes and causal systems if we're

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giving a causal explanation.

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So mechanism is often a kind of

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problematic term in the sense that it's ambiguous or it's not giving us the clarity we

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need because it's it's used in so many different ways.

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So yeah, that would be, I would say part of what

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your examples show is that there's uh

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causal distinctions that matter in science.

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And I think we currently lack the ability to

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clearly refer to those and to refer to the ways in which those

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differences matter for different scientific projects and maybe even

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theoretical projects as well.

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Yeah, that's great.

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Yeah, I mean, I think it's also a symptom of the distinction I'm making is a symptom

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of a different implicit view of science.

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So I think for a lot of evolutionary behavioral scientists, our goal is to not document an

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experimental effect.

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It's to have a claim about here's a bit of abstract functions, sort of like

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physiology used to be.

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Like I think there's a system that does this, this, and this.

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With the caveat of these are rough takes, and it's probably more complicated when you get

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to the lower levels of instantiation, versus a view of science that is we're really

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interested in factors that are predictive, but maybe not causal.

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So we want to do an intervention or describe experimental effects or behavioral

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tendencies.

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And that's often from an applied perspective or a very experimental perspective, where the

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goal is to document here's the way people behave.

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Here's the if you put them in this context, they'll behave in this way.

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And I think that evolutionary behavioral sciences grew up in a more, we're interested in

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the mechanisms, not necessarily predicting behavior.

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And we'd rather have a good model the causal systems like we have for

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vision or motor control for social things, for example.

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But we'd rather have a description, a schematic, a functional schematic of how it works,

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and maybe not one where you could predict the outcomes unless you

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experimentally control them, right?

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Like that's, I think, I think we're good at experimental control.

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Um, and I think we have really good predictive validity in our models, but maybe not real

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world predictive validity, right?

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Um, in the sense of the real world's complicated.

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So, but I think that I think the the misuse of mechanism, I think, is a symptom

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of the goals being somewhat different.

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I don't know, David, if you would agree with that.

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Um Yeah, I I would agree.

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I mean, uh, it seems to me that what separates the evolutionary behavioral sciences from

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the non-evolutionary behavioral sciences is a desire to go to a deeper level of explanatory

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depth.

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And we can get to what it means to explain something and what it means to explain something

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at a deeper level of analysis.

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But it seems to me that a lot of social science uh rests at the approximate level

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of A causes B, B causes C, but we don't have a deeper explanation of where the causal

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system come comes from, what its function or teleological purpose is, uh, how it came

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into existence, uh, how it is situated uh in the evolutionary history of the

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organism in question, and typically in the social sciences, it's it's humans we're talking

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about.

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Um and I think what we seek to do in the evolutionary behavioral sciences is to um offer a

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framework that is concilient with the natural sciences and ideally all the way down to the

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physical sciences, where we have natural selection as an antientropic process that builds

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functional order and complexity into biological systems.

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And we want to understand all living things, uh, including humans, including the human

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mind, including uh human social structures, uh, in terms of that overarching framework.

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Um and so I'm I'm curious um if what you what you see as the

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as the pitfalls um of that project and and and whether there are ways to get lost

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in that attempt to uh integrate the human sciences with the natural sciences and to

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offer a deeper level of of explanation.

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So just out of curiosity, by deeper level, what do you mean here?

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Deeper level of explanation?

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Asking why uh a second time or a third time.

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Yeah.

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And I think also, and just to interrupt too, I think also to add to that, there's often a

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um heuristic where, again, to just appeal to Dennett, uh Dan Dave and I often talk about

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this.

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I think uh it's also typically in psychology, there's often a lot of intentional level

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description.

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And often in certain areas of psychology, including evolutionary, it's

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a more design stance uh level description.

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So we kind of want to eschew intentional level in the sense of uh the

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intentional level is the thing to be explained, but it's not the level at which

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mechanisms or predictions lie.

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We prefer to say there's a system that's sensitive to these cues.

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It produces these pro it generates this kind of, it's algorithmically does this process,

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produces this output.

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So even among the in the proximate system that has nothing to do with evolutionary time,

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it's more of a focus on software as opposed to theory of mindy intentional level.

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And then what David was alluding to is also then that even when we have that software

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level functionalist description, we also want a causal story out

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in the world that is historical, that's constrained by the deductive logic of natural

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selection.

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And to say any of these functions we're postulating need to be deductively

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consistent with what would be selected for, given certain auxiliary assumptions about

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selection pressures, features of the world, what outcomes would be selected for and not.

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And that is missing.

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Um, David is correct.

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I mean, that that last part especially is missing in in most of psychology, yeah.

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Perfect.

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Very clear.

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In so in philosophy of science, there has been interest in

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capturing what it means to give a scientific explanation.

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And then there's also interest in what makes explanations deeper or better

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or more complete.

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And earlier on in my field, I mean, perhaps actually, you know,

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um in the 1960s at least, you still

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saw ideas that deeper explanations or better explanations

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often involved including lower level details.

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There was also a sort of default assumption that explanations in physics were were

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better automatically than explanations at higher scales.

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And this was often combined with the suggestion

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that explanations are better when you include more detail.

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Now there has been movement away from those

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types of assumptions where if you look, I mean, part of what we care about

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doing in philosophy of science is capturing actual scientific work.

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And if you look at the explanations that social scientists provide, and biologists and

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neuroscientists, they don't cite fundamental physics and they do quite well with respect to

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various goals.

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And you might think this is because they don't need to.

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And so part of what you see now in work in

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philosophy of science, and I think work that's helpful, is starting to show

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that when we're interested in this question of what how do you how do you give an

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explanation?

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And what makes explanations better?

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A first thing you have to be very clear about is what do you want to explain?

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What's the explanatory target?

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And part of what your discussion is pointing to is there's very different types of things

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we might want to explain.

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There's very different types of explanatory why questions that scientists ask.

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And so some are going to be more evolutionary type questions, and others just aren't.

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And part of what that helpfully captures is a view where

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the only way you can capture a scientist giving an explanation is when they

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have a very clear explanatory target, in my opinion.

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And it needs to be precise.

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There are other views that I think are less helpful in philosophy of science that suggest

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that whole or better explanations have explanatory targets that are like

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complete and multifaceted, and you want to explain everything about a

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system.

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It's sort of a theory of everything type of explanation.

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Now, if you think of the explanatory target being everything about

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a human, how on earth could you ever give an explanation?

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I mean, it doesn't even right.

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So part of what I think it's helpful for philosophers of science or theoreticians to do in

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this space is we have to capture what the standards are for first the explanatory why

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question or the explanatory target.

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You can't give an explanation until you know what it is you want to explain, right?

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You have to have a very clear explanatory target to do that.

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And we sometimes forget that that step is difficult for scientists.

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We're more focused on how do you give the explanation once you have the why question?

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We forget there's standards for the kinds of why questions you can ask in science.

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You don't get to just ask any kind of question for it to count as a well

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defined explanatory target.

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So there's an example, the philosopher Nagel has this example that nicely fits with this

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discussion, which is why do humans have lungs?

357
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And he says it's ambiguous.

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Like that's actually not well defined enough yet, because it might be asking a more

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evolutionary type question or a physiological one.

360
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That's a small example that just shows, and I think it's helpful in scientific context

361
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because sometimes you have scientists who are talking past each other.

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They want to explain consciousness, right?

363
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Or something else.

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And the word they use, it actually can refer to and can be interpreted

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in terms of many different properties.

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And sometimes even the contrast you need to specify.

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You often need to say as opposed to what.

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So if you want to explain an eye color in a fruit fly, you know, you need to say the as

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opposed to what, or else it just isn't clear enough what you want to explain.

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So part of what I think your discussion suggests is look, there's different

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types of explanatory why questions that we need to capture in this project

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of understanding how scientists give explanations.

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And part of what that reveals is that there isn't one way scientists give explanations

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because there's not one kind of explanatory target.

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So now in philosophy of science, we're more pluralist.

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We think there are many different types of explanations that scientists give

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that are legitimate, the challenge is explanation isn't an anything goes type project.

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So you have to put kind of standards and boundaries on what counts because you don't want

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your pluralism to just be anything goes.

380
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And you want to be able to say when someone is giving a bad explanation.

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And I mean, in contexts where we're communicating to the public, we want to be able to say

382
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how science is giving us our best understanding of the world and why COVID isn't explained

383
00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:17,360
by 5G wireless networks.

384
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So you need to be able to say when an explanation is bad, as opposed to just

385
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if it's satisfying it counts.

386
00:27:25,970 --> 00:27:28,610
That would be a standard that's too low.

387
00:27:28,850 --> 00:27:34,050
Um so yeah, we're more pluralist, or I think we should be, but with that pluralism comes

388
00:27:34,050 --> 00:27:34,690
precision.

389
00:27:35,010 --> 00:27:37,570
You need a very precise explanatory target.

390
00:27:37,810 --> 00:27:43,570
And you can just ask different questions about the same like system or like

391
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thing in the world.

392
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And so that's a different view of explanation that's more piecemeal as opposed to like a

393
00:27:50,180 --> 00:27:54,660
theory of everything, explanation, it also suggests that

394
00:27:56,260 --> 00:27:59,700
the lower you go, you don't always get a better explanation.

395
00:28:00,420 --> 00:28:06,340
Um, sometimes I refer to this in terms of explanation isn't a game of how low can you

396
00:28:06,340 --> 00:28:11,140
go, but what gives you control or what gives you information about

397
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control.

398
00:28:12,900 --> 00:28:18,070
But yeah, very interesting deeper levels of explanation, and that's um something

399
00:28:18,070 --> 00:28:20,070
philosophers latch onto as well.

400
00:28:20,230 --> 00:28:24,870
And I think even in science, we we're very attracted to maybe

401
00:28:26,150 --> 00:28:31,750
going to lower and lower levels, or just if you ask more follow-up why questions, you sort

402
00:28:31,750 --> 00:28:34,550
of change the explanatory target as well.

403
00:28:34,870 --> 00:28:38,470
Yeah, that's that that's amazing because I think like as you were talking, I was just

404
00:28:38,470 --> 00:28:44,040
thinking a lot of I think the even my experience of science is the explanations

405
00:28:44,600 --> 00:28:47,640
are just this ad hoc aggregate.

406
00:28:47,960 --> 00:28:52,120
So in social psychology, there's just certain kinds of explanations.

407
00:28:52,280 --> 00:28:54,440
The explanatory target is always implicit.

408
00:28:54,520 --> 00:28:58,600
And then as a graduate student, you sort of, well, there's the neuroscientists and they

409
00:28:58,600 --> 00:28:59,720
have these kinds of explanations.

410
00:28:59,880 --> 00:29:02,440
There's social psychologists and they have these kinds of explanations.

411
00:29:02,600 --> 00:29:06,840
There's evolutionary psychologists, there's cognitive scientists, there's developmental

412
00:29:06,840 --> 00:29:07,720
psychologists.

413
00:29:07,880 --> 00:29:13,090
Nobody is being explicit about their explanatory targets, but it's a pile of

414
00:29:13,090 --> 00:29:14,050
explanations.

415
00:29:14,290 --> 00:29:19,250
And then I think what students do, and I know I did this, and I still do this, it's just

416
00:29:19,250 --> 00:29:23,570
this implicit individual difference of like what kind of explanation do I find appealing?

417
00:29:23,810 --> 00:29:29,170
And I think many of us go through our entire careers without even having a discussion about

418
00:29:29,810 --> 00:29:31,970
what are the different kinds of explanations?

419
00:29:32,130 --> 00:29:33,330
How do they all fit together?

420
00:29:33,490 --> 00:29:38,380
And I think what we, what David and I, and I think many evolutionary psychologists were

421
00:29:38,620 --> 00:29:44,540
were worried about this because we feel like we're victims of misunderstandings, of

422
00:29:45,020 --> 00:29:50,380
where people misunderstand what we're trying to do, and they think sometimes we're in

423
00:29:50,380 --> 00:29:52,220
conflict with them when we're not.

424
00:29:52,460 --> 00:29:58,450
And then it's also the opposite where there are times where I am in conflict

425
00:29:58,450 --> 00:30:00,530
with somebody, but they don't think I am, right?

426
00:30:00,690 --> 00:30:06,530
Um, and I think it's this, it's a consequence of uh, and I just

427
00:30:06,530 --> 00:30:07,970
make this concrete.

428
00:30:08,210 --> 00:30:10,370
Uh, so I study social groups.

429
00:30:10,530 --> 00:30:15,010
I'm really interested in sort of like, well, how does the mind define a social group at a

430
00:30:15,010 --> 00:30:17,170
level that you can engineer into a system?

431
00:30:17,730 --> 00:30:20,960
And I'll get people saying, you well, why do you need that?

432
00:30:21,120 --> 00:30:23,280
It's obvious what a social group is.

433
00:30:23,440 --> 00:30:29,440
And that's an example of the person, it wants to use their own evolved psychology,

434
00:30:29,520 --> 00:30:34,080
which does produce and is useful in everyday, like in a Dan Dennett sense, like you know,

435
00:30:34,160 --> 00:30:39,440
you understand what a group is, but they're failing to see why there's another

436
00:30:39,440 --> 00:30:42,870
explanation of, well, how does your intuition work?

437
00:30:43,110 --> 00:30:43,430
Right.

438
00:30:43,590 --> 00:30:47,590
Um, and so that's something like I've personally dealt with, where I've literally gotten a

439
00:30:47,590 --> 00:30:53,430
paper rejected because people don't even accept the premise that my opening question is

440
00:30:53,430 --> 00:30:54,070
valid.

441
00:30:54,230 --> 00:31:00,070
Um, and so I think that's just a clear example of a consequence of this ad hoc

442
00:31:00,390 --> 00:31:05,990
accumulation of explanations, as opposed to this like it's very therapeutic to hear you

443
00:31:05,990 --> 00:31:10,680
talk because I feel like you're articulating, you're like you're like a counselor for the

444
00:31:10,680 --> 00:31:14,520
behavioral sciences to explaining why we're not coordinating.

445
00:31:14,600 --> 00:31:18,840
And I feel like we need a better coordination of explanatory targets.

446
00:31:20,440 --> 00:31:25,720
It's funny that you say that because there's a famous philosopher of science, Bill Wimsat,

447
00:31:26,200 --> 00:31:31,970
who suggests that philosophers can or should be like therapists to

448
00:31:31,970 --> 00:31:32,610
scientists.

449
00:31:32,770 --> 00:31:36,290
I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm totally on board with that.

450
00:31:36,450 --> 00:31:42,370
It's a very I mean I I know it's very it's quite I mean I

451
00:31:42,370 --> 00:31:47,970
think philosophers should work to be helpful to

452
00:31:47,970 --> 00:31:53,780
scientists and they actually what's interesting is WIMSAT and others

453
00:31:53,780 --> 00:31:59,380
also refer to philosophy of science as conceptual engineering or cognitive engineering,

454
00:31:59,700 --> 00:32:04,580
where there's a functional element involved in how we're looking at scientists because we

455
00:32:04,580 --> 00:32:10,020
think they're doing things on purpose with a function or a goal in mind, and we're trying

456
00:32:10,020 --> 00:32:11,300
to figure out what that is.

457
00:32:11,460 --> 00:32:17,170
So yeah, it's a little bit of a function coming in in a different way.

458
00:32:17,730 --> 00:32:23,490
But part of our job, I mean, part of it is coming into a space and trying to figure

459
00:32:23,490 --> 00:32:25,330
out what you all care about.

460
00:32:25,810 --> 00:32:31,650
Because I think, and most of us think, you have the, you

461
00:32:31,650 --> 00:32:36,370
know, you have the, like you know what you're doing, but then sometimes there are these

462
00:32:36,370 --> 00:32:41,010
disagreements where this, you know, super,

463
00:32:42,120 --> 00:32:46,440
you know, technical work and philosophy that's been happening for decades can be helpful

464
00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:50,520
because we went down a rabbit hole and something didn't work out.

465
00:32:50,760 --> 00:32:55,640
Or hopefully we can help kind of clarify what is going on.

466
00:32:55,800 --> 00:32:59,160
But that's a high that's a high bar for people in my field.

467
00:32:59,320 --> 00:33:03,160
And uh they don't always care about science as much as they should.

468
00:33:04,070 --> 00:33:10,070
But um but yeah, we're also kind of studying what you all do, although I your

469
00:33:10,070 --> 00:33:11,990
field is more theoretical too.

470
00:33:12,310 --> 00:33:17,990
So um there's a kind of a similar angle because our work

471
00:33:17,990 --> 00:33:21,590
certainly has that aspect as well.

472
00:33:21,830 --> 00:33:26,150
Yeah, I think for me and David I feel probably I David I'll let speak for himself, but I

473
00:33:26,150 --> 00:33:32,060
feel like I've become like I love philosophy, but I become uh I've been pushed into it as

474
00:33:32,060 --> 00:33:35,580
well because I wanted to just do engineering.

475
00:33:35,740 --> 00:33:39,580
Uh, I was just like, I want to think about people mechanistically.

476
00:33:39,740 --> 00:33:45,740
It's fun to think about social things from like uh what's the doohickey behind this,

477
00:33:45,820 --> 00:33:47,740
you know, like what's the software?

478
00:33:47,980 --> 00:33:51,820
Um, and uh in an evolutionary approach was really helpful for that.

479
00:33:52,060 --> 00:33:57,980
But then it was just it with the sociology of the social sciences

480
00:33:58,460 --> 00:34:03,910
were not already understanding these different kinds of explanations.

481
00:34:04,150 --> 00:34:08,070
And so people just got really angry at me as a graduate student.

482
00:34:08,150 --> 00:34:13,030
And I had to figure out, well, why that people are getting angry when I'm talking about

483
00:34:13,030 --> 00:34:16,470
there's like a system that does this, it has this function.

484
00:34:16,710 --> 00:34:19,670
People, it wasn't what people were used to doing.

485
00:34:19,940 --> 00:34:24,020
and I I can see now why that is and where we are at historically.

486
00:34:24,180 --> 00:34:30,020
But it was for me, it was just like it was it was born out of just a confusion about why

487
00:34:30,100 --> 00:34:34,660
isn't what seems pretty straightforward being accepted sociologically.

488
00:34:34,740 --> 00:34:37,860
But I'll let David kind of speak for himself too.

489
00:34:38,340 --> 00:34:42,340
Yeah, no, I I I would agree with that account and and second it.

490
00:34:42,420 --> 00:34:47,890
There's definitely um different philosophies within the social and

491
00:34:47,890 --> 00:34:53,250
behavioral sciences, uh, that often collide with each other, uh, in rather unproductive

492
00:34:53,250 --> 00:34:53,730
ways.

493
00:34:53,890 --> 00:34:59,090
Um, and I for one think that uh the social sciences would greatly benefit from more

494
00:34:59,170 --> 00:35:04,610
philosophy or from more uh philosophical rigor about the concepts that are being used, uh,

495
00:35:04,690 --> 00:35:10,000
and about, you know, what those concepts mean and about what goals we're actually pursuing.

496
00:35:10,400 --> 00:35:12,080
I don't think there is enough of that.

497
00:35:12,240 --> 00:35:14,080
And and I think there ought to be more.

498
00:35:14,160 --> 00:35:18,080
I think, I mean, a big part of it is just the theory crisis, which we've talked about on

499
00:35:18,080 --> 00:35:19,840
many episodes of the podcast.

500
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:25,680
I don't think there is an overarching theory that the social

501
00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:29,920
sciences have gotten behind in the same way that other sciences have had overarching

502
00:35:29,920 --> 00:35:31,360
theoretical frameworks.

503
00:35:32,240 --> 00:35:35,520
And that is enormously helpful for scientific progress, I think.

504
00:35:36,350 --> 00:35:41,230
Um, and I think I I think of philosophy as in large part a kind of theoretical science, or

505
00:35:41,310 --> 00:35:45,790
or at least the non-empirical aspects of scientific work, where we're talking about we're

506
00:35:45,790 --> 00:35:50,590
making deductive and inductive and abductive arguments, uh, and we're making inferences to

507
00:35:50,590 --> 00:35:54,670
the best explanation and working out what the implications are of particular empirical

508
00:35:54,670 --> 00:35:55,070
results.

509
00:35:55,150 --> 00:35:59,550
That that to me is essentially what philosophy is: working out the implications of various

510
00:35:59,550 --> 00:36:00,270
premises.

511
00:36:00,350 --> 00:36:02,270
Um, and I don't think we're doing enough of that.

512
00:36:02,540 --> 00:36:06,540
Um so I I would agree that, yeah, w with with Dave that there's not enough coordination,

513
00:36:06,700 --> 00:36:11,660
there's not enough theoretical integration, uh, and I think greater philosophical rigor can

514
00:36:11,660 --> 00:36:12,220
help with that.

515
00:36:12,300 --> 00:36:18,060
But I'm curious if you if you share that opinion, uh being from you know outside

516
00:36:18,060 --> 00:36:19,660
of our discipline.

517
00:36:21,100 --> 00:36:22,300
Absolutely.

518
00:36:22,540 --> 00:36:28,150
It's I mean, I'm biased, of course, because I was

519
00:36:28,710 --> 00:36:34,550
trained from philosophers who take science very seriously and who

520
00:36:34,870 --> 00:36:40,790
expect it to accommodate descriptively what scientists are up to,

521
00:36:40,950 --> 00:36:45,830
but also have a normative element where it's searching for the justification and the

522
00:36:45,830 --> 00:36:48,390
rationale behind the work.

523
00:36:48,790 --> 00:36:54,640
And so I I got very nice examples of philosophers doing that when I was in

524
00:36:54,640 --> 00:36:55,200
grad school.

525
00:36:55,360 --> 00:36:57,280
Jim Woodward is one of them.

526
00:36:57,440 --> 00:36:59,280
Uh I mentioned Bill Wimsat.

527
00:36:59,360 --> 00:37:01,840
He's another fantastic example.

528
00:37:02,320 --> 00:37:08,240
And so I mean, I think it's not easy for philosophers to do that

529
00:37:08,240 --> 00:37:13,840
for all sorts of reasons that have to be well versed enough in a scientific domain.

530
00:37:14,240 --> 00:37:20,130
And you're, you know, if you're if you're talking with scientists, which

531
00:37:20,130 --> 00:37:25,410
you should be, they're just so expert in their field that you need to learn a bit of the

532
00:37:25,410 --> 00:37:26,610
language that they use.

533
00:37:26,770 --> 00:37:32,290
I mean, all of our fields have, and I have to also not use philosophical jargon because

534
00:37:32,290 --> 00:37:33,970
it's not always going to be helpful.

535
00:37:34,130 --> 00:37:38,920
So it is partly figuring out when you're talking with scientists or if you're engaged with

536
00:37:38,920 --> 00:37:43,480
scientific work, which you should be if you're interested in writing about how explanations

537
00:37:43,480 --> 00:37:49,080
work in, you know, the social sciences or evolutionary psychology or physics, you know, you

538
00:37:49,160 --> 00:37:52,200
gotta know a little bit about what's going on in those domains.

539
00:37:52,360 --> 00:37:53,720
But it can be non-trivial.

540
00:37:53,880 --> 00:37:58,680
I mean, many philosophers of science start studying in a scientific domain and then they

541
00:37:58,680 --> 00:38:01,160
get drawn into philosophy of science.

542
00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:04,040
That's a common path for us.

543
00:38:04,710 --> 00:38:10,630
But even still, we have to avoid science reporting, where we're just

544
00:38:10,710 --> 00:38:12,710
kind of saying what scientists are up to.

545
00:38:12,870 --> 00:38:18,390
If you're searching for that justification, that normative element, that's where you can

546
00:38:18,390 --> 00:38:20,310
really, I think, do helpful work.

547
00:38:20,550 --> 00:38:26,230
And that's where I think you can work with scientists so that they can

548
00:38:26,640 --> 00:38:32,240
pitch their ideas in a way that shows, like, look, here's the question I'm focused on.

549
00:38:32,720 --> 00:38:37,040
Your question is a great one too, and you're working on that.

550
00:38:37,120 --> 00:38:39,440
But here's this specific thing I'm interested in.

551
00:38:39,600 --> 00:38:40,640
Here's how it's different.

552
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:42,880
And here's the approach I'm taking to do this.

553
00:38:43,040 --> 00:38:48,970
It's interesting how it's a bit of a social, I mean, getting reviewers to see what

554
00:38:48,970 --> 00:38:51,530
you're up to or grants accepted.

555
00:38:51,930 --> 00:38:57,370
I mean, there's a very interesting just social scene where

556
00:38:57,850 --> 00:39:03,450
you're trying to persuade someone and use words to indicate, you know, that you're

557
00:39:03,450 --> 00:39:07,610
doing uh what you're up to and to kind of convince them it's a good project.

558
00:39:07,690 --> 00:39:12,810
So it's it's interesting to see scientists manage that, but it's very,

559
00:39:13,600 --> 00:39:18,800
it's very fun, and it can be very rewarding as a philosopher to look at that

560
00:39:18,800 --> 00:39:22,720
justification for this work and being able to.

561
00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:26,080
I mean, part of what we're doing is there's just these distinctions.

562
00:39:26,320 --> 00:39:30,960
You're trying to distinguish explanation is one thing scientists are interested in,

563
00:39:31,200 --> 00:39:34,480
description is another project, and those are different.

564
00:39:34,880 --> 00:39:38,160
And within explanation, maybe there's different types.

565
00:39:38,400 --> 00:39:40,880
How do we capture what those types are?

566
00:39:41,680 --> 00:39:46,990
And um yeah, I think we want to be useful to

567
00:39:46,990 --> 00:39:52,510
scientists, and then we also want to help with science communication sometimes.

568
00:39:52,670 --> 00:39:56,990
If scientists are communicating their work to the public, it's very useful to have the

569
00:39:56,990 --> 00:40:02,830
justification because then you can say, hey, look, here's why we view this as

570
00:40:03,150 --> 00:40:08,830
a helpful way to understand, you know, what explains this

571
00:40:08,830 --> 00:40:11,310
outcome and also what doesn't.

572
00:40:11,620 --> 00:40:17,620
Um, but that's yeah, can it can be challenging because it's sort of

573
00:40:17,620 --> 00:40:18,820
different audiences.

574
00:40:19,620 --> 00:40:24,020
Um, but yeah, I definitely favor of you who are philosophers.

575
00:40:24,260 --> 00:40:30,020
And philosophy of science can be helpful and can be continuous with scientific work.

576
00:40:30,420 --> 00:40:35,090
I think Jerry Fodor, I think this is a joke, but I think he was meaning it sarcastically.

577
00:40:35,250 --> 00:40:39,730
But I like most things, I admire Jerry Foder, but I think he was wrong to be sarcastic

578
00:40:39,730 --> 00:40:39,970
about it.

579
00:40:40,130 --> 00:40:46,130
He has a line that said, The reason why um social sciences or psychology isn't working is

580
00:40:46,130 --> 00:40:49,890
because n or even philosophy of mind isn't working is because not enough distinctions are

581
00:40:49,890 --> 00:40:50,450
being made.

582
00:40:50,690 --> 00:40:53,010
And he was, I think, joking about that, but I think that's right.

583
00:40:53,170 --> 00:40:58,770
I think uh for me at least, like we I have a we have a paper about modularity,

584
00:40:59,040 --> 00:41:04,240
anyways, just saying there's two sides, there's a debate about modularity, but the argument

585
00:41:04,240 --> 00:41:10,160
is that um the distinction about what we one side means by it and another means by

586
00:41:10,160 --> 00:41:11,520
it, they're just missing each other.

587
00:41:11,600 --> 00:41:14,320
So there's this debate that's completely unnecessary.

588
00:41:14,560 --> 00:41:20,080
Um and so I like this idea that um part of coordinating

589
00:41:20,080 --> 00:41:26,000
everybody is to just see if the scientists are hitting each other for a for a

590
00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:27,440
bad reason or a good reason.

591
00:41:27,600 --> 00:41:31,950
And if it's for a good reason, well then let them do that within the rules of the game.

592
00:41:32,110 --> 00:41:37,790
But if for it's a bad reason, then please fix that so that it's the unnecessary debate.

593
00:41:37,950 --> 00:41:38,430
Yeah.

594
00:41:40,350 --> 00:41:46,350
Um, what do you concretely, if if evolutionary behavioral scientists want help from a

595
00:41:46,350 --> 00:41:51,870
philosopher or philosopher of science to uh look at what we're doing,

596
00:41:52,030 --> 00:41:57,840
characterize it, almost be an ethnographer or translator of what we're doing, Is it

597
00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:00,960
something that those of us who are doing it are in a best position?

598
00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:05,760
Or just concretely, what can we do as a community

599
00:42:07,120 --> 00:42:12,800
to communicate with outsiders about what our explanatory goals are?

600
00:42:12,960 --> 00:42:16,800
Are there particular conferences or people?

601
00:42:17,680 --> 00:42:23,590
Um, you know like how do we how do we hire a philosopher of science to help us uh to

602
00:42:23,590 --> 00:42:29,110
consult in in sort of for PR or say here's the here's the way you um

603
00:42:29,430 --> 00:42:34,230
can explain what you're doing um and maybe that's an ill posed question because it's very

604
00:42:34,230 --> 00:42:40,070
uh discipline specific but do you have any practical suggestions for us

605
00:42:40,230 --> 00:42:46,120
um well one would be that you all probably are

606
00:42:46,120 --> 00:42:51,960
philosophers a little bit already, and that I mean you

607
00:42:52,120 --> 00:42:57,960
you brought up Dennett a number of times, but in some cases, finding the places

608
00:42:57,960 --> 00:43:03,800
where the kind of theoretical elements of your work, whether

609
00:43:03,800 --> 00:43:08,920
it's assumptions or differences in methods, um

610
00:43:09,560 --> 00:43:15,410
or kind of topics are coming up, I guess, is kind of seeing how

611
00:43:15,410 --> 00:43:21,090
that's very similar to and already involves a bit of philosophy of

612
00:43:21,090 --> 00:43:21,650
science.

613
00:43:21,810 --> 00:43:27,330
Philosophy of science is a pretty small field, and so it's

614
00:43:27,330 --> 00:43:31,570
probably um helpful to

615
00:43:33,400 --> 00:43:39,160
um talk to people that seem people that work in philosophy of science

616
00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:41,800
who seem useful.

617
00:43:42,920 --> 00:43:48,440
There's also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a great resource that

618
00:43:48,440 --> 00:43:53,480
often reviews different topics in philosophy of science and gives a lot of different

619
00:43:53,480 --> 00:43:54,120
citations.

620
00:43:55,160 --> 00:44:00,530
I think probably figuring out what you what you think

621
00:44:00,530 --> 00:44:05,570
philosophy could be helpful for in the context of your work, and then seeking out either

622
00:44:05,570 --> 00:44:11,330
philosophers or philosophical work would be good ways

623
00:44:11,330 --> 00:44:12,290
to start.

624
00:44:13,490 --> 00:44:19,490
And um yeah, I think we've brought up a number of places

625
00:44:19,490 --> 00:44:23,570
where philosophy can be useful.

626
00:44:24,690 --> 00:44:30,100
Um Topics that came up are like mechanism or

627
00:44:30,100 --> 00:44:35,300
giving accounts of different types of explanations that are showing up,

628
00:44:35,540 --> 00:44:38,260
perhaps also standards in science.

629
00:44:40,500 --> 00:44:45,220
Um, but yeah, maybe kind of starting first with

630
00:44:47,490 --> 00:44:53,090
Concrete challenges in your field that you think philosophers can be helpful for,

631
00:44:53,330 --> 00:44:57,410
or if there are particular things that you think are particularly difficult to communicate

632
00:44:57,410 --> 00:45:03,250
to different audiences, like the public, kind of figuring out what those are and why

633
00:45:03,250 --> 00:45:06,530
it's um why it's difficult.

634
00:45:06,770 --> 00:45:12,700
I mean, I work on causation, and so even just telling people outside of academia,

635
00:45:12,860 --> 00:45:17,340
I mean, if you tell them you weren't you're a philosopher of science, that doesn't usually

636
00:45:17,340 --> 00:45:18,540
get a lot of yeah, yeah.

637
00:45:18,700 --> 00:45:23,420
And but even causation, it's a it's a little non-trivial to think of.

638
00:45:23,500 --> 00:45:29,260
And of course, like the the shark and the ice cream sales examples come up quickly.

639
00:45:29,740 --> 00:45:35,580
But it's good to just continuously be open to new ways of clearly

640
00:45:35,850 --> 00:45:40,650
capturing what's going on in a scientific domain or an academic one when you're

641
00:45:40,650 --> 00:45:42,810
communicating to different audiences.

642
00:45:44,490 --> 00:45:50,170
I think when you become expert in an area, you sort of lose your theory of mind or your

643
00:45:50,170 --> 00:45:52,170
vantage point from somewhere else.

644
00:45:52,410 --> 00:45:58,410
And so you forget that your comp your the complicated words in your field

645
00:45:58,410 --> 00:46:00,570
don't, you know, mean something to someone else.

646
00:46:00,650 --> 00:46:06,420
So you sort of forget when people are outside your field what they understand quickly

647
00:46:06,500 --> 00:46:07,220
and what they don't.

648
00:46:07,380 --> 00:46:10,820
So maybe interdisciplinary discussions can help with that a bit.

649
00:46:10,980 --> 00:46:16,340
But yeah, I do think we need to focus more on communication to the public,

650
00:46:16,580 --> 00:46:18,500
science communication to the public.

651
00:46:18,660 --> 00:46:23,700
And maybe part of this pluralism angle would be one helpful way forward, right?

652
00:46:23,860 --> 00:46:29,620
I mean, there's lots of interesting biases about how science works in everyday life

653
00:46:29,780 --> 00:46:35,650
and in science, the sort of picture of the lower you go, the

654
00:46:35,650 --> 00:46:38,210
better the explanation is, is one of them.

655
00:46:38,450 --> 00:46:44,370
Also, mechanism sometimes is used in a machine-like way, where the human body is

656
00:46:44,370 --> 00:46:49,570
just a machine and you got to find the lower level engine that does the stuff that

657
00:46:49,570 --> 00:46:50,210
produces.

658
00:46:50,610 --> 00:46:55,490
If you have that picture of the world, then what about social factors at a higher level or

659
00:46:55,490 --> 00:46:56,770
environmental factors at a high level?

660
00:46:56,930 --> 00:47:02,220
Yeah, you just can't capture things that causally influence and modern medicine is

661
00:47:02,220 --> 00:47:07,660
criticized for for not being able to capture social causes as much.

662
00:47:07,820 --> 00:47:13,260
So maybe, maybe working to figure out what are these more

663
00:47:14,460 --> 00:47:17,420
simple, cartoonish default pictures we have.

664
00:47:17,580 --> 00:47:18,700
And we have them in science too.

665
00:47:18,780 --> 00:47:23,500
It can be attractive to let go, or it can be attractive to have that lower level picture

666
00:47:23,580 --> 00:47:25,580
and hard to kind of let go of it.

667
00:47:25,850 --> 00:47:31,770
And so, yeah, maybe when it comes to communication to the public, figuring out

668
00:47:31,770 --> 00:47:37,770
what the sticky points are and the challenging concepts and um yeah, how to how to

669
00:47:37,770 --> 00:47:43,450
communicate them clearly and how to show that there isn't this like one

670
00:47:43,770 --> 00:47:49,640
way it all works where there's this more pluralistic picture, and

671
00:47:49,640 --> 00:47:51,480
that science is an ongoing process.

672
00:47:51,720 --> 00:47:57,560
You're getting more and more information in your explanation, but maybe

673
00:47:57,560 --> 00:48:02,840
they're all a little partial too, more schematic, like you mentioned earlier.

674
00:48:03,240 --> 00:48:08,040
Yeah, I really like um, I think from my two sense bet is um dualism.

675
00:48:08,200 --> 00:48:14,070
So implicit dualism, where sort of low-level stuff is resigned for low level body

676
00:48:14,070 --> 00:48:14,390
stuff.

677
00:48:14,550 --> 00:48:17,910
And then mental stuff is resigned for the little homunculus in the head.

678
00:48:18,150 --> 00:48:23,990
So the idea that something like breastfeeding is gonna make like a kid uh have a

679
00:48:23,990 --> 00:48:26,950
better mental existence is sort of unintuitive, right?

680
00:48:27,030 --> 00:48:30,790
Like it's just, you know, people don't really think that way, or like the food you eat is

681
00:48:30,790 --> 00:48:33,510
gonna affect like your well being your mental well being, you know.

682
00:48:33,590 --> 00:48:36,950
Like that's a little bit it's even it's hard hard for me to even think that way, right?

683
00:48:37,190 --> 00:48:41,120
It's more just sort of like, well, you should decide to be happy or you know think about

684
00:48:41,120 --> 00:48:47,120
being happy or the idea that um something like cues low-level cues

685
00:48:47,280 --> 00:48:52,960
in the ecology are affecting your risk taking or um things like that.

686
00:48:53,280 --> 00:48:55,120
I think that's very unintuitive to people.

687
00:48:55,200 --> 00:48:59,680
And I think like part of training in cognitive science is this idea that

688
00:49:01,110 --> 00:49:06,950
The stuff that you're conscious of is only a subset of all the things that are causing

689
00:49:06,950 --> 00:49:10,070
your mental um experiences.

690
00:49:10,230 --> 00:49:14,710
And I think that's a lot of a lot of what we run up against is sort of dualism.

691
00:49:14,790 --> 00:49:19,910
So I think that would be an example of this kind of sticky way of thinking that really is

692
00:49:19,910 --> 00:49:25,110
almost like a scientific bias that the public and frankly many of us, I mean, I would

693
00:49:25,110 --> 00:49:28,150
include myself, have uh as scientists.

694
00:49:29,430 --> 00:49:35,140
Do you think that that has to do with an expectation that causal relationships

695
00:49:35,460 --> 00:49:40,420
need to be physical or physically interact, like billiard ball cases?

696
00:49:43,860 --> 00:49:48,180
I have this uh um thing about the evolutionary psychology of psychology.

697
00:49:48,260 --> 00:49:50,020
So I think like it's it's very denet.

698
00:49:50,260 --> 00:49:55,490
It's very much like I think we have this folk physics, and so it's very intuitive for that

699
00:49:55,730 --> 00:50:00,050
system to sort of there's certain things in the world that are into that are intuitively

700
00:50:00,210 --> 00:50:01,890
applicable to the that system.

701
00:50:01,970 --> 00:50:06,050
So if we think about like brains, oh yeah, I can imagine billiard ball interactions.

702
00:50:06,290 --> 00:50:11,970
But that system doesn't really help me for like day-to-day human behavior, right?

703
00:50:12,130 --> 00:50:16,450
Because it's it's not matter that I can see moving around and hitting each other.

704
00:50:17,120 --> 00:50:20,000
And then I think we have this folk artifact system.

705
00:50:20,080 --> 00:50:24,880
And I think a lot of what I what we do as scientists, so kind of like software engineering

706
00:50:24,880 --> 00:50:30,880
or reverse engineering functionalist systems, like I study things about groups, and

707
00:50:30,880 --> 00:50:36,240
I think there's a system that is attentive to this class of cues, and it

708
00:50:36,710 --> 00:50:41,910
produces these outputs, and it's all very uh abstract, functional design stance.

709
00:50:41,990 --> 00:50:44,710
And I think that's an output of the artifact system.

710
00:50:44,870 --> 00:50:48,070
And then there's our theory of mind system, the intentional level.

711
00:50:48,230 --> 00:50:50,550
Um, and that's the beliefs, desires.

712
00:50:50,630 --> 00:50:54,470
There's a little person in my head, there's the stuff that's me, there's the stuff that's

713
00:50:54,470 --> 00:50:57,190
not me, and there's interactionism between those.

714
00:50:57,350 --> 00:51:01,910
Um, I think those three ontologies are produced by these evolved systems.

715
00:51:01,990 --> 00:51:06,560
And I think when when a scientific enterprise

716
00:51:07,120 --> 00:51:10,400
involves more than one, it gets complicated.

717
00:51:10,560 --> 00:51:16,320
I think psychology is really hard because maybe uniquely it's three uh evolved ontologies.

718
00:51:16,400 --> 00:51:22,080
Like physics is is the weird empirical results and our intuitive physics, you know.

719
00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:27,970
Um uh chemistry uh maybe you know

720
00:51:28,050 --> 00:51:32,850
maybe two systems I don't know but I think like psychology is the intentional the design

721
00:51:32,850 --> 00:51:37,810
stance well I mean engineering would be like the design stance the physical stance and the

722
00:51:37,810 --> 00:51:42,210
empirical results but I think psychology involves this intentional thing too so we have

723
00:51:42,210 --> 00:51:48,200
these three ontologies on top of the empirical data And I think for

724
00:51:48,280 --> 00:51:54,040
my my take on psychology is it's just a mess because those three ontologies are

725
00:51:54,040 --> 00:51:58,680
still not integrated conceptually.

726
00:51:59,240 --> 00:52:04,840
And uh we are still generations of scientists who were

727
00:52:04,920 --> 00:52:10,200
trying to, those of us who are trying to be clear about which ontology we're contributing

728
00:52:10,200 --> 00:52:15,930
to, are interacting with a world that those ontologies aren't clear

729
00:52:15,930 --> 00:52:17,930
among reviewers or funding agencies.

730
00:52:18,090 --> 00:52:19,210
I think we'll get there.

731
00:52:19,370 --> 00:52:24,890
But I think the evolutionary sciences, not uniquely, but I think the evolutionary sciences

732
00:52:25,690 --> 00:52:31,450
are rare in that we really are design stancy about things that are

733
00:52:31,450 --> 00:52:33,530
typically intentional right now.

734
00:52:33,690 --> 00:52:36,250
Um, we're more designy than intentional.

735
00:52:36,410 --> 00:52:38,730
And I think we we get a lot of blowback for that reason.

736
00:52:38,810 --> 00:52:40,170
I think that's where we're at.

737
00:52:41,860 --> 00:52:47,860
Yeah, I would have thought that the design stance would have various

738
00:52:47,860 --> 00:52:53,540
advantages and even allow it to the field or one of the

739
00:52:54,980 --> 00:53:00,820
one of the kind of theoretical modules to be viewed as advantageous.

740
00:53:02,330 --> 00:53:05,050
I think it I think it has to do with explanatory.

741
00:53:05,210 --> 00:53:10,890
I think it's because intentional level uh descriptions are so adequate because we have this

742
00:53:10,890 --> 00:53:11,770
theory mind system.

743
00:53:11,930 --> 00:53:16,090
If I tell you that David loves France, you know, it's like a Jerry Fodor point.

744
00:53:16,170 --> 00:53:20,490
You know, it's like everyday common sense, belief, desire psychology is so effective.

745
00:53:20,730 --> 00:53:24,890
And I'm not like an eliminativist where I think, like, you know, like I don't think lower

746
00:53:24,890 --> 00:53:26,810
levels of reduction are better.

747
00:53:27,040 --> 00:53:29,280
I just think you have to supplement, right?

748
00:53:29,360 --> 00:53:33,760
And so I don't want to get rid of an intentional level description, but I want to explain

749
00:53:33,760 --> 00:53:35,520
it in terms of mechanism.

750
00:53:35,840 --> 00:53:41,520
And I think where there's institutional selection for the

751
00:53:41,840 --> 00:53:47,760
most succinct description, um, for some reason

752
00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:51,600
the design-mindedness is more maybe too precise.

753
00:53:51,760 --> 00:53:53,280
It's not super helpful yet.

754
00:53:53,440 --> 00:53:58,250
Like I don't know if from a predictive perspective it's always

755
00:53:59,450 --> 00:54:03,930
um accurate outside the context of a very delineated study.

756
00:54:04,170 --> 00:54:07,930
And so I think people are in the habit of intentional level descriptions.

757
00:54:08,090 --> 00:54:09,210
That's my that's my guess.

758
00:54:09,370 --> 00:54:12,730
And I don't know, maybe David has a thought about the sociology.

759
00:54:12,970 --> 00:54:17,130
But but I definitely think that that's I agree with you, Lauren, that like it seems

760
00:54:17,130 --> 00:54:22,720
puzzling that the design stance um is the uh

761
00:54:22,880 --> 00:54:25,040
upstart um underdog.

762
00:54:25,520 --> 00:54:28,720
Um but I but I kind of wonder if historically that's always true.

763
00:54:28,880 --> 00:54:34,560
And it's just that eventually, because it can be a bit more precise, even if

764
00:54:34,560 --> 00:54:40,000
it's not because if it can be more precise and while it's accompanied by the higher level

765
00:54:40,000 --> 00:54:44,240
description, both do better than just the high-level description on its own.

766
00:54:44,480 --> 00:54:50,210
But I think until you start having enough data or people figuring out

767
00:54:50,210 --> 00:54:55,490
how to do those design level descriptions, it seems very speculative.

768
00:54:55,730 --> 00:54:58,930
Like just like I think a physiology is a good example.

769
00:54:59,090 --> 00:55:05,010
So, like the idea that um, like when I I um coming across like in

770
00:55:05,010 --> 00:55:10,930
like um physiology for a long time, the the concepts or the entities were things

771
00:55:10,930 --> 00:55:15,090
like moisture, darkness, warmth, which are the things that you like find when you cut into

772
00:55:15,090 --> 00:55:19,700
a body, there was no, and those were the kinds of intuitive apparent phenomena.

773
00:55:19,860 --> 00:55:24,820
Something like a filtering nephritia, you know, like nobody was going to come up with that

774
00:55:25,140 --> 00:55:30,420
because that's not a substance, that's not a feature that you kind of find when you cut in.

775
00:55:30,500 --> 00:55:33,620
It's a theoretical concept based on an idea about function.

776
00:55:33,860 --> 00:55:38,260
And if you postulate, I think there's a system that does filtering, somebody will be like,

777
00:55:38,420 --> 00:55:39,780
Well, what's your data for that?

778
00:55:40,420 --> 00:55:44,870
And right now, early days of physiology, there was no data.

779
00:55:45,030 --> 00:55:47,270
So people would be like, I don't have any data, right?

780
00:55:47,430 --> 00:55:51,430
So so in other words, like there's a there's a million ways to measure the moisture of

781
00:55:51,430 --> 00:55:52,630
different parts of the body.

782
00:55:52,790 --> 00:55:55,910
There's a million ways to measure the warmth of different parts of the body.

783
00:55:56,070 --> 00:56:01,670
There's a million, so if your currency is data, I think that there's sort of like a

784
00:56:01,670 --> 00:56:07,240
local minima that uh is can be defended, which is sort of if you're

785
00:56:07,240 --> 00:56:11,320
postulating an abstract function that we don't even know how to look for yet, we don't have

786
00:56:11,320 --> 00:56:14,120
any data for, it seems very speculative.

787
00:56:15,000 --> 00:56:20,920
That can be um argued against because there's no data for it, if the currency is

788
00:56:20,920 --> 00:56:21,240
data.

789
00:56:21,720 --> 00:56:27,720
And so I uh that's actually my my full uh theory of why we're we're at this intentional

790
00:56:27,720 --> 00:56:32,360
level description for many areas, not all areas, and it's changing, but that's that's my

791
00:56:32,360 --> 00:56:33,570
thesis, Yeah.

792
00:56:35,170 --> 00:56:36,130
Fascinating.

793
00:56:36,290 --> 00:56:41,970
And it reminds me of cases in medical

794
00:56:42,130 --> 00:56:48,130
sciences and neighboring fields where different types of disease phenotypes can

795
00:56:48,130 --> 00:56:52,690
have signs and symptoms that are easier or harder to basically measure.

796
00:56:52,930 --> 00:56:58,530
And so there's sometimes a view that if a disease has

797
00:57:00,160 --> 00:57:06,080
so symptoms are typically viewed as something that a patient experiences, but a third

798
00:57:06,080 --> 00:57:09,280
party can't easily measure, like pain or dizziness.

799
00:57:09,440 --> 00:57:13,120
If I'm dizzy or I'm in pain, you sort of have to rely on my report.

800
00:57:13,280 --> 00:57:17,280
I might be acting a certain way, but you can't measure it the way you could measure my

801
00:57:17,280 --> 00:57:18,960
temperature or if I have a rash.

802
00:57:19,120 --> 00:57:20,080
That would be a sign.

803
00:57:20,240 --> 00:57:24,720
So we often distinguish between signs and symptoms and symptoms are a little more

804
00:57:25,360 --> 00:57:31,210
viewed as questionable, because you just can't easily measure

805
00:57:31,210 --> 00:57:31,530
them.

806
00:57:31,850 --> 00:57:37,770
And then if you get various diseases like in psychiatry or other fields, where the

807
00:57:37,770 --> 00:57:42,730
cluster of signs and symptoms is variable across patients that we think have the same

808
00:57:42,730 --> 00:57:48,650
condition, again, you run into this like, how do we measure how many people have

809
00:57:48,650 --> 00:57:54,640
schizophrenia when the list of characteristics that a patient needs to have to

810
00:57:54,640 --> 00:57:59,920
get that diagnosis, we allow wiggle room in terms of what how they need to present.

811
00:58:00,080 --> 00:58:05,280
Compare that to something like, you know, hypertension if you have high blood pressure, you

812
00:58:05,280 --> 00:58:08,720
have like a single property and it's super easy to measure.

813
00:58:08,880 --> 00:58:14,800
And that's the so there's there's different things that we're interested

814
00:58:14,800 --> 00:58:17,930
in, maybe in the natural world.

815
00:58:18,650 --> 00:58:24,330
Um, and some of them are are easier or

816
00:58:24,570 --> 00:58:26,410
harder to measure.

817
00:58:26,570 --> 00:58:32,410
I wonder if that's one way to put it, or there's biases about how real something is based

818
00:58:32,410 --> 00:58:37,050
on it being more physical, more material, and sort of easier to measure.

819
00:58:37,130 --> 00:58:42,680
But of course, it's very important to appreciate that a

820
00:58:42,680 --> 00:58:47,960
patient's in pain or they're experiencing some symptoms when we have no ability to get the

821
00:58:47,960 --> 00:58:51,160
same kind of measurement of it as something else.

822
00:58:51,400 --> 00:58:56,520
So, yeah, interesting where there's cases of more complex

823
00:58:56,840 --> 00:59:01,880
phenomena of interest where we are really working

824
00:59:01,880 --> 00:59:07,850
conceptually to build the category that matters and maybe showing people

825
00:59:07,850 --> 00:59:12,570
examples of cases where we do that and where they wouldn't want to deny it's a real thing,

826
00:59:12,730 --> 00:59:17,450
but where it is just different from that intuitive physics picture of, well, there's a

827
00:59:17,450 --> 00:59:19,610
baseball and it hit the window.

828
00:59:20,090 --> 00:59:25,930
You know, not everything in science is going to be as like simple as

829
00:59:25,930 --> 00:59:26,730
those cases.

830
00:59:26,970 --> 00:59:31,930
And when you get a human involved, there's tons of examples that show up, of course.

831
00:59:32,200 --> 00:59:37,560
um disease examples and many others, just where things get get so complicated.

832
00:59:37,880 --> 00:59:38,120
Yeah.

833
00:59:38,200 --> 00:59:40,680
And I think that's like I would David mentioned the theory crisis.

834
00:59:40,760 --> 00:59:44,760
And one of the symptoms of the theory crisis, especially in the behavioral sciences, is

835
00:59:44,760 --> 00:59:49,480
that constructs are re-descriptions of the data.

836
00:59:49,720 --> 00:59:54,930
And I think that's a consequence of these things that are not just the bait window and the

837
00:59:54,930 --> 01:00:00,530
baseball, it requires institutional tolerance of ambiguity and patience.

838
01:00:00,690 --> 01:00:04,850
Because if a grant reviewer is like, well, where's the where's the data?

839
01:00:05,010 --> 01:00:10,370
You know, it's it's indirect, or it's it's or it's a more complicated, abstract,

840
01:00:10,610 --> 01:00:13,250
latent thing we're trying to make an inference about.

841
01:00:13,540 --> 01:00:19,220
But if you have a measure and it's you can measure it, and this is the construct, you know,

842
01:00:19,540 --> 01:00:21,140
social dominance orientation.

843
01:00:21,220 --> 01:00:24,660
It's these 13 questions, it's the number I assign.

844
01:00:24,820 --> 01:00:28,660
I can give you Lauren and you, David, a number for it.

845
01:00:28,820 --> 01:00:29,700
It's concrete.

846
01:00:29,860 --> 01:00:33,140
Nobody can argue with that concreteness.

847
01:00:33,220 --> 01:00:35,940
They can argue with the validity of it, but not the concreteness.

848
01:00:36,020 --> 01:00:40,990
And I think um I think the patience for understanding.

849
01:00:41,150 --> 01:00:43,230
I think it comes back to the explanatory goals.

850
01:00:43,390 --> 01:00:49,390
If you're trying to make an inference about an inferred entity, like a

851
01:00:49,390 --> 01:00:55,390
system in the body or the mind, especially, that isn't just a baseball and a

852
01:00:55,390 --> 01:01:01,340
window, it requires tolerance for um it

853
01:01:01,340 --> 01:01:02,620
doesn't look sciencey.

854
01:01:02,700 --> 01:01:07,900
It doesn't have, you know, like a neuro, a picture of neurons looks sciencey.

855
01:01:08,380 --> 01:01:09,980
The numbers look sciencey.

856
01:01:10,220 --> 01:01:15,020
But if I say I think there's a system that tracks alliances, and there's

857
01:01:15,260 --> 01:01:21,100
75 ways to measure it, and they all get at it indirectly, that's words on

858
01:01:21,100 --> 01:01:21,900
a page.

859
01:01:22,060 --> 01:01:27,190
Um, and I might be right, but if somebody's measuring a single neuron and has beautiful

860
01:01:27,190 --> 01:01:32,790
figures, um, or if somebody can take a picture of it, for people who are not experts, it

861
01:01:32,790 --> 01:01:35,430
just seems more concrete and more real.

862
01:01:35,990 --> 01:01:38,310
Um so yeah, I don't know.

863
01:01:38,390 --> 01:01:39,430
I yeah.

864
01:01:41,190 --> 01:01:46,400
Yeah, there's famous examples from the history of medicine and

865
01:01:46,400 --> 01:01:52,320
bacteriology, where Robert Koch, who was postulating that germs were the cause of certain

866
01:01:52,320 --> 01:01:58,320
diseases, couldn't early on take pictures of like anthrax bacteria because

867
01:01:58,320 --> 01:02:02,160
photography wasn't advanced enough at that point for him to do that.

868
01:02:02,320 --> 01:02:07,440
So early on, he was drawing pictures of these bacteria that he saw in this microscope,

869
01:02:07,690 --> 01:02:10,250
trying to convince his research community.

870
01:02:10,490 --> 01:02:16,090
And um yeah, but once photography was more advanced, that

871
01:02:16,410 --> 01:02:22,250
was more motivating for the community to get on board with the fact that

872
01:02:22,250 --> 01:02:26,570
there were these tiny bacteria that were single species.

873
01:02:27,770 --> 01:02:31,520
But even then it took a very long time to change the medical community.

874
01:02:31,680 --> 01:02:33,280
I mean, or the scientific community.

875
01:02:33,360 --> 01:02:36,480
And part of what's interesting is to think of how we do that.

876
01:02:36,720 --> 01:02:42,480
The how because it in in grant calls and the idea of scientific work is that you are doing

877
01:02:42,480 --> 01:02:43,520
something novel.

878
01:02:43,680 --> 01:02:48,800
And in grants, there is often the suggestion that you need to do something transformative,

879
01:02:49,270 --> 01:02:54,630
but like you're sure it'll work out, but you're not totally sure because it's so novel and

880
01:02:54,630 --> 01:02:55,270
transformative.

881
01:02:55,590 --> 01:03:01,350
So it's it's sort of like you have to play in the you have to play within

882
01:03:01,350 --> 01:03:07,190
the rules enough so that you can kind of break them a little bit down

883
01:03:07,190 --> 01:03:08,070
the road.

884
01:03:08,310 --> 01:03:09,510
And so it is interesting.

885
01:03:09,670 --> 01:03:14,320
We have this in philosophy too where you sort of have to work in some ways, or you feel

886
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:19,840
like you're constrained a bit by the current views, and you have to show you're working

887
01:03:19,840 --> 01:03:25,840
within them enough to then make progress in another direction.

888
01:03:26,240 --> 01:03:31,040
But then there are examples from the history of science where someone is coming, you know,

889
01:03:31,200 --> 01:03:37,120
just from a completely different field and they're maybe ignored

890
01:03:37,120 --> 01:03:39,440
for a long time, or they can make a big change.

891
01:03:39,600 --> 01:03:45,570
But it it is interesting kind of how to think about the steps

892
01:03:45,570 --> 01:03:51,010
to take to advance programs that

893
01:03:51,330 --> 01:03:52,930
are different.

894
01:03:53,170 --> 01:03:57,570
Um yeah.

895
01:03:58,850 --> 01:04:04,610
And what kinds of evidence, as you're suggesting, does look

896
01:04:04,610 --> 01:04:10,460
more sciencey to the researchers who were essentially

897
01:04:11,660 --> 01:04:13,100
evaluating your work.

898
01:04:14,780 --> 01:04:19,260
I want to um pitch you on a way that I've been thinking about

899
01:04:19,900 --> 01:04:20,940
explanations.

900
01:04:21,260 --> 01:04:26,460
Uh and uh and you know, I I recognize that this is my own intuitive way of understanding it

901
01:04:26,540 --> 01:04:29,580
and and looking for what counts as a good explanation or a bad explanation.

902
01:04:29,660 --> 01:04:35,050
I'm curious to see if if you can tear it apart and tell me why I'm wrong.

903
01:04:35,210 --> 01:04:40,810
But the way I'm thinking about how to evaluate a good explanation is in terms of the ratio

904
01:04:40,810 --> 01:04:45,290
of what it assumes to what it successfully predicts or explains.

905
01:04:52,570 --> 01:04:55,040
And that it makes very few assumptions.

906
01:04:55,120 --> 01:05:00,640
You know, few assumptions about variation, heritability, uh, non uh sorry, differential

907
01:05:00,640 --> 01:05:01,280
reproduction.

908
01:05:01,440 --> 01:05:06,160
And these are really uh plausible, rock solid assumptions that would be hard to deny.

909
01:05:06,400 --> 01:05:11,600
And yet by making those very uh that very small number of very plausible assumptions, um,

910
01:05:11,760 --> 01:05:16,320
you get this enormous explanatory and predictive boon, right?

911
01:05:16,480 --> 01:05:22,320
Where you can uh essentially explain the adaptedness of organisms

912
01:05:22,320 --> 01:05:25,070
around the world to their environment.

913
01:05:25,550 --> 01:05:31,470
And you get a whole array of predictions you can make about how organisms will

914
01:05:31,470 --> 01:05:35,390
be adapted to their environment, how those traits will change over time.

915
01:05:36,750 --> 01:05:42,750
And it's essentially the centerpiece of biology in terms of an

916
01:05:42,750 --> 01:05:45,150
underlying explanatory and predictive framework.

917
01:05:45,310 --> 01:05:49,870
And so the ratio of what it assumes to what it successfully predicts and explains is

918
01:05:49,870 --> 01:05:50,510
enormous.

919
01:05:50,670 --> 01:05:55,320
It's mind-boggling to think about the difference between that numerator and that

920
01:05:55,320 --> 01:05:56,520
denominator, right?

921
01:05:56,680 --> 01:06:02,520
And so that's what I strive for in terms of providing explanations for things in my work

922
01:06:02,600 --> 01:06:07,080
and what I how I try to evaluate theoretical frameworks is to think about, well, what are

923
01:06:07,080 --> 01:06:08,360
the assumptions it's making?

924
01:06:08,520 --> 01:06:10,440
Um, how many of those assumptions are there?

925
01:06:10,600 --> 01:06:13,160
How many of those assumptions are implicit and unstated?

926
01:06:13,810 --> 01:06:19,730
How plausible are those assumptions based on everything we know from the empirics?

927
01:06:19,970 --> 01:06:25,010
And then what is it buying us in terms of successful predictions and explanations?

928
01:06:25,570 --> 01:06:29,490
And I'm basically just looking at the ratio of those two things, and that's how I'm

929
01:06:29,490 --> 01:06:29,730
thinking.

930
01:06:29,810 --> 01:06:35,410
I'm curious if you think that uh is is the right way to think about explanation, or if I'm

931
01:06:35,410 --> 01:06:39,490
missing something, or if there's uh something else to the story.

932
01:06:40,020 --> 01:06:40,900
I like that.

933
01:06:40,980 --> 01:06:46,420
There's a couple of follow-up questions I would ask, which would be in

934
01:06:46,420 --> 01:06:52,340
terms of assumptions, what if you just toggled the plausibility, not

935
01:06:52,340 --> 01:06:53,460
how many you have?

936
01:06:53,620 --> 01:06:57,140
But suppose you just have a lot of assumptions, but they're all super plausible.

937
01:06:57,460 --> 01:06:57,860
Yeah.

938
01:06:58,180 --> 01:07:00,500
Versus uh just having few.

939
01:07:00,660 --> 01:07:04,900
Suppose I only have one assumption, but it's really not so medium.

940
01:07:04,980 --> 01:07:10,870
So one question would be what do you think about Plausibility more than how

941
01:07:10,870 --> 01:07:13,430
many assumptions you bring on board, but I like that.

942
01:07:13,670 --> 01:07:19,430
And then the other thing is we get into this topic and

943
01:07:20,070 --> 01:07:25,910
question about prediction because sometimes we can get predictions from

944
01:07:25,910 --> 01:07:28,310
stuff we think isn't explanatory.

945
01:07:28,550 --> 01:07:34,400
So would you want to beef that up more and say This is

946
01:07:34,400 --> 01:07:37,440
giving me more than just prediction.

947
01:07:37,840 --> 01:07:43,840
It's giving me information about hypothetical changes or

948
01:07:43,840 --> 01:07:45,120
hypothetical control.

949
01:07:45,840 --> 01:07:51,280
That would be a question I would have about the prediction

950
01:07:51,600 --> 01:07:57,440
piece only because mirror correlations or sometimes things we think are

951
01:07:57,440 --> 01:08:00,240
not explanatory can be predictive.

952
01:08:00,400 --> 01:08:02,480
So, yeah, what would you think about that?

953
01:08:03,070 --> 01:08:05,550
I I totally buy both of those amendments.

954
01:08:05,710 --> 01:08:08,190
Yeah, plausibility is the better way to think about it.

955
01:08:08,270 --> 01:08:11,710
Um yeah, as you as you say, a single assumption could be very implausible, and you could

956
01:08:11,710 --> 01:08:13,710
have ten assumptions that are all extremely plausible.

957
01:08:13,790 --> 01:08:17,230
Um it really what matters is the the plausibility of your assumptions.

958
01:08:17,390 --> 01:08:20,910
Uh granted there will be a correlation, but if you're making lots of assumptions, chances

959
01:08:20,910 --> 01:08:23,390
are, you know, not all of them can be true.

960
01:08:23,470 --> 01:08:27,140
I mean, just probabilistically speaking, but in general, plausibility is the more important

961
01:08:27,140 --> 01:08:27,940
thing to look at.

962
01:08:28,180 --> 01:08:32,900
And yeah, um, and not mere prediction, but I think successful prediction, predictions that

963
01:08:32,900 --> 01:08:35,220
turn out to be vindicated by the data.

964
01:08:35,300 --> 01:08:40,260
Uh and and I think of an explan uh, you know, uh explanatory power as a prediction of

965
01:08:40,260 --> 01:08:41,860
something that we already know is true.

966
01:08:42,020 --> 01:08:42,260
Right.

967
01:08:42,420 --> 01:08:46,420
Like uh you can work out an implication from this model that it predicts the state of

968
01:08:46,420 --> 01:08:48,900
affairs, and turns out that we we live in those state of affairs.

969
01:08:48,980 --> 01:08:52,500
And I think of that as an explanation rather than a prediction.

970
01:08:52,660 --> 01:08:54,890
But I that's that's how I'm thinking of it.

971
01:08:54,970 --> 01:08:57,370
And I I I buy your uh amendments.

972
01:08:58,170 --> 01:08:58,410
Good.

973
01:08:58,570 --> 01:09:04,330
I mean one one question too is is if you think breadth is something that gives you a better

974
01:09:04,330 --> 01:09:10,170
explanation, or is it fine for it to explain a kind of narrow set of cases or

975
01:09:10,170 --> 01:09:11,930
systems or circumstances?

976
01:09:12,570 --> 01:09:18,520
Um yeah, um, I would think that breadth is

977
01:09:18,520 --> 01:09:20,040
better, all else equal.

978
01:09:20,200 --> 01:09:24,920
Um, the more stuff that you can successfully predict or explain, the better.

979
01:09:25,240 --> 01:09:29,320
Granted, there are going to be limitations, and that if you're if you're trying to explain

980
01:09:29,320 --> 01:09:33,640
a small piece of the world, there's going to be limits to how much you can successfully

981
01:09:33,640 --> 01:09:34,440
predict or explain.

982
01:09:34,520 --> 01:09:38,920
But in general, yeah, I would say intuitively, the more you can explain and predict, the

983
01:09:38,920 --> 01:09:39,240
better.

984
01:09:39,750 --> 01:09:43,030
But a trade-off would probably be the realistic susiga.

985
01:09:43,350 --> 01:09:44,150
I mean, in practice.

986
01:09:44,950 --> 01:09:45,590
In practice, yeah.

987
01:09:45,750 --> 01:09:50,550
Nothing's going to explain everything or predict everything, but um you want to get as you

988
01:09:50,550 --> 01:09:53,990
know as much bang for your uh buck as possible, I think.

989
01:09:54,070 --> 01:09:54,470
Yeah.

990
01:09:55,830 --> 01:09:57,510
Sorry, Lauren, go ahead and you're gonna say something.

991
01:09:57,910 --> 01:10:03,260
Um I wanted to ask both of you, Lauren especially, um, is so the the one thing we do a lot,

992
01:10:03,420 --> 01:10:07,900
I'm gonna again sort of this is my therapy session of like we evolutionary behavioral

993
01:10:07,900 --> 01:10:13,580
scientists, um, we speculate about mechanisms prior to

994
01:10:13,900 --> 01:10:15,980
coming up with tests of them.

995
01:10:16,220 --> 01:10:21,660
And so I'm curious from a like a history of science or philosophical perspective, where

996
01:10:21,820 --> 01:10:27,020
we're talking about David's talking about we want an explanation that accounts for the

997
01:10:27,020 --> 01:10:32,750
data, But we're also in this weird situation where when we're doing it

998
01:10:32,750 --> 01:10:38,590
real time, we're making a claim that we don't even know how what data to

999
01:10:38,590 --> 01:10:40,190
collect yet, right?

1000
01:10:40,350 --> 01:10:41,790
Like in some sense.

1001
01:10:41,950 --> 01:10:47,950
This is the physiology analogy where if you think there's something like a filter, that

1002
01:10:47,950 --> 01:10:53,660
is a speculation prior to figuring out if there is such a filter,

1003
01:10:54,300 --> 01:10:58,220
this is what it should look like if it's doing this job.

1004
01:10:58,460 --> 01:11:01,740
Therefore, we should collect these data.

1005
01:11:01,820 --> 01:11:04,460
And if we're right, this is what the data will look like.

1006
01:11:04,620 --> 01:11:10,060
But there's a delay between what you think exists and what data you collect.

1007
01:11:10,220 --> 01:11:14,850
As Marvin Minsky, who is one of the founders of AI, put it, you can't look for something

1008
01:11:15,010 --> 01:11:20,930
till you have the idea of it, which I think is a good but funny, funnily apt point that

1009
01:11:20,930 --> 01:11:22,130
people sometimes forget.

1010
01:11:22,370 --> 01:11:28,370
And so I wonder if historically those things where it's a

1011
01:11:28,370 --> 01:11:34,240
claim, but it's a prediction where the data aren't there yet, if

1012
01:11:34,240 --> 01:11:40,000
those are sort of don't win out as well, or they get more um beaten down than

1013
01:11:40,000 --> 01:11:46,000
those where the prediction can be pretty quickly turned around, um,

1014
01:11:46,240 --> 01:11:52,080
such that we already have the data, for example, or we we know very quickly how to measure

1015
01:11:52,240 --> 01:11:53,520
the prediction.

1016
01:11:53,760 --> 01:11:55,760
Um, if that question makes sense.

1017
01:11:55,920 --> 01:12:01,810
So it's this idea that some ideas, there's almost uh an extra step of

1018
01:12:01,810 --> 01:12:07,570
auxiliary assumptions to even know how to generate the data versus those where the data, if

1019
01:12:07,570 --> 01:12:13,410
it doesn't already exist, is pretty reasonably gettable with very

1020
01:12:13,410 --> 01:12:17,010
minimal work, time, effort, auxiliary assumptions, etc.

1021
01:12:19,410 --> 01:12:24,690
I wonder if so to me that sounds like a very reasonable

1022
01:12:24,930 --> 01:12:30,860
approach for um tackling various types of

1023
01:12:30,860 --> 01:12:32,060
systems and problems.

1024
01:12:32,220 --> 01:12:35,420
I wonder if it's characteristic of a more

1025
01:12:36,380 --> 01:12:41,740
function-based, goal-oriented system

1026
01:12:42,380 --> 01:12:47,580
where you can you can play that game actually quite well or better than in other cases

1027
01:12:47,660 --> 01:12:51,340
where you don't have the the goal or the function piece as much.

1028
01:12:52,140 --> 01:12:58,050
But It reminds me of some situations in in COG-SI where there's studies of causal

1029
01:12:58,050 --> 01:13:03,170
cognition where you're first sort of seeing what humans are up to and what they're doing

1030
01:13:03,170 --> 01:13:04,290
and how they're reasoning.

1031
01:13:04,450 --> 01:13:09,250
And then you're sort of postulating like what's going on in their cognitive process for

1032
01:13:09,250 --> 01:13:10,210
doing that thing.

1033
01:13:10,450 --> 01:13:15,730
And you're you're very much focused on like what's the function of their reasoning in this

1034
01:13:15,730 --> 01:13:16,370
situation.

1035
01:13:16,610 --> 01:13:22,500
And then you are sort of reverse engineering, well, what's the reasoning process that

1036
01:13:22,500 --> 01:13:24,340
allows them to do that?

1037
01:13:25,220 --> 01:13:30,820
There's a book called Causation with a human face, where this is discussed in a more

1038
01:13:30,820 --> 01:13:34,500
theoretical way by the philosopher Jim Woodward.

1039
01:13:35,220 --> 01:13:41,220
But um, but yeah, I wonder if leaning into the sense in which that's

1040
01:13:41,220 --> 01:13:47,220
something you can do in a very principled way with the function piece and with the goal

1041
01:13:47,300 --> 01:13:53,210
or the goal oriented piece, where that's, I mean, we sometimes talk about explanations that

1042
01:13:53,210 --> 01:13:59,130
are functional explanations, where those look a bit different from standard causal

1043
01:13:59,130 --> 01:14:00,090
explanations.

1044
01:14:00,890 --> 01:14:05,690
Some of the examples here look a little cartoonish where it's, you know,

1045
01:14:05,930 --> 01:14:11,580
you're interested in explaining um the existence of

1046
01:14:11,580 --> 01:14:14,060
something on the basis of the fact that it serves a function.

1047
01:14:14,380 --> 01:14:16,540
Like a doorstop would be a good concrete example.

1048
01:14:16,700 --> 01:14:17,740
Like a doorstop, yeah.

1049
01:14:18,380 --> 01:14:19,580
Yeah, like a doorstop.

1050
01:14:19,740 --> 01:14:25,580
So there's this artifact or this system in a living organism that's present, and you're

1051
01:14:25,580 --> 01:14:27,260
sort of like, why is this present?

1052
01:14:27,420 --> 01:14:32,620
And the way you give the explanation for why it's present or why it exists is the sense in

1053
01:14:32,620 --> 01:14:38,220
which it serves a function or it serves a goal, and it evolved to come into being, or

1054
01:14:38,470 --> 01:14:43,430
a uh someone designed it or created it on the basis of the fact that it so that's an

1055
01:14:43,430 --> 01:14:49,430
explanation where the parts are set up differently than here's the disease, what's

1056
01:14:49,430 --> 01:14:51,270
the cause that explains this disease?

1057
01:14:51,430 --> 01:14:53,670
There's no, I mean, there's no functional.

1058
01:14:54,150 --> 01:14:57,910
You can do away with functional considerations more in that case.

1059
01:14:58,390 --> 01:15:03,750
And so I I wonder if there are certain strategies or

1060
01:15:03,750 --> 01:15:09,700
heuristics you can use if you have that functional piece and so much

1061
01:15:10,020 --> 01:15:15,300
of our the way we're thinking about living systems, it needs to have that functional piece.

1062
01:15:15,380 --> 01:15:20,580
I mean, genes aren't just, you know, these things aren't just doing random, you know,

1063
01:15:20,900 --> 01:15:26,580
actions or engaged in random processes without very much

1064
01:15:26,580 --> 01:15:29,700
being tuned to functions and goals.

1065
01:15:30,100 --> 01:15:31,550
So no, I quite like that.

1066
01:15:31,630 --> 01:15:36,510
It would be interesting to look at cases where you get pushback with that kind of model.

1067
01:15:36,910 --> 01:15:42,670
When a reviewer is looking at it, or someone who's maybe coming from a paradigm that is the

1068
01:15:42,670 --> 01:15:47,790
more I found a gene, let me wiggle it, or I found a

1069
01:15:48,430 --> 01:15:51,070
single molecule, let me intervene on it.

1070
01:15:51,230 --> 01:15:55,070
It'd be interesting to see scientists from those other domains.

1071
01:15:55,310 --> 01:15:58,680
What are their main thoughts when they first see that picture?

1072
01:15:58,760 --> 01:16:04,520
And is there a way to present it that keeps the hackles down?

1073
01:16:04,840 --> 01:16:10,520
Or I don't, yeah, it maybe it depends too on who the main um yeah

1074
01:16:10,920 --> 01:16:13,080
reviewers are or different audiences.

1075
01:16:13,560 --> 01:16:14,520
Yeah, I really like that.

1076
01:16:14,600 --> 01:16:19,720
The idea of function, um, yeah, it especially this is where I mean that's why I'm an

1077
01:16:19,720 --> 01:16:21,240
evolutionary person too.

1078
01:16:21,320 --> 01:16:25,800
And I think it's no accident in my experience, and David, you can tell me what yours is, is

1079
01:16:25,800 --> 01:16:31,390
that it's people who already are thinking functionally about the mind that find evolution

1080
01:16:31,390 --> 01:16:32,190
helpful.

1081
01:16:32,590 --> 01:16:37,630
And the people who either, and I don't want to be too, I mean many of these are my dear

1082
01:16:37,630 --> 01:16:41,790
friends, and I don't want to be too dismissive, but I think individual differences and how

1083
01:16:41,790 --> 01:16:46,990
much they like thinking about the mind as a mechanical functional entity

1084
01:16:47,390 --> 01:16:50,270
track how useful they find evolution.

1085
01:16:50,430 --> 01:16:56,200
Um, in the sense of if you have a belief, desire, intentional level description,

1086
01:16:56,280 --> 01:16:57,880
like people like social groups.

1087
01:16:57,960 --> 01:17:03,480
And I I can run through my theory of mind of is this the kind of social group I would like?

1088
01:17:03,640 --> 01:17:06,920
I can do a lot of studies just based on that model.

1089
01:17:07,800 --> 01:17:13,480
Um, but for me, uh I I wanted a more

1090
01:17:13,480 --> 01:17:19,330
mechanical explanation, a functional explanation of well, what does it mean to um why

1091
01:17:19,490 --> 01:17:21,410
why do people like joining groups?

1092
01:17:21,490 --> 01:17:25,810
And you just there's no um how would you engineer a system?

1093
01:17:25,970 --> 01:17:30,130
What rules would it have to say this is a good group or this is a bad group?

1094
01:17:30,370 --> 01:17:34,610
And then you start to say, well, I don't know how to do that from an intentional

1095
01:17:34,610 --> 01:17:35,170
perspective.

1096
01:17:35,330 --> 01:17:38,450
I could give you examples, but I don't know what to program into the robot.

1097
01:17:38,610 --> 01:17:42,930
But from an evolutionary perspective, you could say, well, there's these abstractions in

1098
01:17:42,930 --> 01:17:44,920
the world, like there's costs.

1099
01:17:45,000 --> 01:17:48,440
There's a class of outcomes where somebody could hurt you or take your stuff.

1100
01:17:48,600 --> 01:17:54,520
And so people providing entity agents providing like loyalty and assistance

1101
01:17:54,520 --> 01:17:55,000
to you.

1102
01:17:55,160 --> 01:18:00,120
So you're starting to come up with these abstractions that are grounded in classes of

1103
01:18:00,120 --> 01:18:01,000
outcomes.

1104
01:18:01,320 --> 01:18:07,190
But it's it's you're talking about new constructs, like it's still loyalty, but it's like a

1105
01:18:07,190 --> 01:18:08,550
system that's looking for loyalty.

1106
01:18:08,630 --> 01:18:09,590
And well, how would that work?

1107
01:18:09,670 --> 01:18:11,030
And what cues would that use?

1108
01:18:11,190 --> 01:18:16,950
And so um I think an evolutionary approach um populates

1109
01:18:17,590 --> 01:18:22,630
the a design level or this mechanical level um

1110
01:18:22,870 --> 01:18:28,150
account um in a way that the intentional level um account doesn't.

1111
01:18:28,390 --> 01:18:34,340
And uh and yeah, I think the pushback sometimes people give for you don't

1112
01:18:34,340 --> 01:18:39,380
need a mechanism is is missing that that transition.

1113
01:18:39,620 --> 01:18:40,260
Yeah.

1114
01:18:41,700 --> 01:18:47,700
Yeah, I will give you um a link to the name of

1115
01:18:47,700 --> 01:18:53,620
this book, this Woodward book I'm mentioning, because there it does really sound like

1116
01:18:53,940 --> 01:18:59,850
what would be interesting to look at is whether this is a different sequence of

1117
01:18:59,850 --> 01:19:02,090
steps in explanatory practice.

1118
01:19:02,250 --> 01:19:08,170
And I think there are other cases where there's attempts to capture what's going on in

1119
01:19:08,170 --> 01:19:13,930
some of these situations where maybe you have more clearly identified an agreement on the

1120
01:19:13,930 --> 01:19:16,410
assumption of what the goals are for a system.

1121
01:19:16,730 --> 01:19:20,170
And then you're sort of like, well, these are the goals.

1122
01:19:20,330 --> 01:19:22,330
You can see how it's useful for the system.

1123
01:19:22,410 --> 01:19:28,360
And then you're like, if we find something that serves those goals, then this gives

1124
01:19:28,360 --> 01:19:34,200
us a way of um, yeah, I forget

1125
01:19:34,200 --> 01:19:40,120
how to kind of recreate this explanatory, but it's very different from this kind of

1126
01:19:40,120 --> 01:19:46,040
standard garden variety picture of you have the explanatory target over

1127
01:19:46,040 --> 01:19:51,400
here, you have the explanatory stuff on the other side, but doesn't involve this

1128
01:19:51,400 --> 01:19:52,840
functional piece.

1129
01:19:53,400 --> 01:19:59,210
Um so yeah, I wonder if the distinction of types of explanation

1130
01:19:59,210 --> 01:20:05,210
and types of explanatory practice you can do with a functional

1131
01:20:05,210 --> 01:20:06,090
orientation.

1132
01:20:06,330 --> 01:20:08,650
You can do something more with that.

1133
01:20:08,890 --> 01:20:11,690
Of course, you have to get them to agree with the goals.

1134
01:20:11,850 --> 01:20:16,250
That's an assumption, but I don't think that will be the difficult part.

1135
01:20:16,410 --> 01:20:22,330
What might be nice is to just show the sequence of steps where look, once

1136
01:20:22,330 --> 01:20:28,260
you agree with these goals, now you can um show

1137
01:20:29,540 --> 01:20:35,300
the kind of utility of understanding a system that

1138
01:20:35,620 --> 01:20:41,540
is like hooked up to them or um has various

1139
01:20:41,540 --> 01:20:43,380
mechanisms that are serving those goals.

1140
01:20:43,540 --> 01:20:49,380
But yeah it is I mean partly if mechanism does mean something very particular to

1141
01:20:50,650 --> 01:20:56,490
A researcher who's who you're talking to, um, they're

1142
01:20:56,570 --> 01:21:02,330
you know, it could it could be difficult or they they might just resist it based on the

1143
01:21:02,330 --> 01:21:02,570
word.

1144
01:21:02,730 --> 01:21:07,210
We see this partly in neuroscience where you have neuroscientists talking about network

1145
01:21:07,210 --> 01:21:10,090
mechanisms or cognitive mechanisms.

1146
01:21:10,330 --> 01:21:14,730
And the more reductive molecular biology researchers are like, you guys don't have

1147
01:21:14,730 --> 01:21:15,610
mechanisms.

1148
01:21:15,930 --> 01:21:20,900
We have mechanisms, they involve lower level molecular

1149
01:21:21,140 --> 01:21:26,900
cellular entities, but they're like a network mechanism just doesn't so

1150
01:21:26,980 --> 01:21:32,580
it's more of a rhetorical game there where it's it's not

1151
01:21:32,580 --> 01:21:38,260
always very helpful to use that word if it if it just means

1152
01:21:38,260 --> 01:21:39,540
different things.

1153
01:21:40,270 --> 01:21:46,110
but maybe explanation and prediction or causation, and

1154
01:21:46,430 --> 01:21:52,270
highlighting the utility of function and what it allows you to do in cases, and maybe

1155
01:21:52,270 --> 01:21:57,950
philosophical work where other people have already said, hey, look, this is an explanatory

1156
01:21:57,950 --> 01:21:58,590
pattern.

1157
01:21:59,150 --> 01:22:02,990
This you see it in cognitive science in this crazy area.

1158
01:22:03,150 --> 01:22:08,110
You see it over here in Uri Allen's work in systems biology, where he's reverse

1159
01:22:08,190 --> 01:22:13,320
engineering, you know, circuits that function to do all sorts of things, oscillate and

1160
01:22:13,320 --> 01:22:13,800
whatever.

1161
01:22:14,040 --> 01:22:19,400
So if you if you have other people referring to this as an explanatory pattern and and

1162
01:22:19,400 --> 01:22:25,000
you're sort of able to say it's different from the one you're used to or that like

1163
01:22:25,320 --> 01:22:30,200
maybe more traditional one, I wonder if that would wonder if that would help.

1164
01:22:30,570 --> 01:22:34,010
Yeah, I think I think function is hitting the nail on the head.

1165
01:22:34,090 --> 01:22:39,610
And I think that's both our bet our what we bring to the table, but it's also our um

1166
01:22:39,850 --> 01:22:40,970
our vulnerability.

1167
01:22:41,130 --> 01:22:45,770
And I think like you see this where people will say, oh, evolutionary psychology or

1168
01:22:45,770 --> 01:22:48,650
evolutionary behavioral scientists, they just think everything's adaptive.

1169
01:22:48,730 --> 01:22:52,250
So it's this Panglossian thing where, you know, like, oh, noses are for holding up

1170
01:22:52,250 --> 01:22:53,210
eyeglasses.

1171
01:22:53,370 --> 01:22:58,680
Um, and I love that example because it's a great example of it, it uh it

1172
01:22:58,680 --> 01:23:02,120
eliminates its own argument because it's obviously absurd.

1173
01:23:02,200 --> 01:23:05,640
Because if you think about a nose, it's not well designed to hold up eyeglasses at all.

1174
01:23:05,800 --> 01:23:08,760
Like the design features of a nose are not at all well designed.

1175
01:23:08,840 --> 01:23:12,120
And that's so obvious that it's absurd.

1176
01:23:12,440 --> 01:23:17,000
But then you think, well, people are saying you could just postulate anything as has any

1177
01:23:17,000 --> 01:23:20,680
function, and there's no pre functional predictions about what it should look like.

1178
01:23:20,760 --> 01:23:26,670
When in fact the the example relies on that you can do the very thing they're

1179
01:23:26,670 --> 01:23:30,190
claiming you can't do, which is say something doesn't look like it's well designed to do

1180
01:23:30,190 --> 01:23:30,270
that.

1181
01:23:30,430 --> 01:23:33,870
I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but it's basically the nose is not well designed.

1182
01:23:34,030 --> 01:23:36,350
Obviously that functional account is wrong.

1183
01:23:36,590 --> 01:23:39,470
So therefore you could just say any functional account will go.

1184
01:23:39,630 --> 01:23:41,550
Like that's the logic of the yeah.

1185
01:23:42,030 --> 01:23:47,790
I mean maybe what would be nice is to have a very clear um

1186
01:23:48,920 --> 01:23:53,240
discussion on the like just so story criticism.

1187
01:23:53,400 --> 01:23:53,640
Yeah.

1188
01:23:53,800 --> 01:23:57,080
And sh because that does come up so often.

1189
01:23:57,160 --> 01:24:03,160
And so to actually bring it up and to show what this is used to suggest

1190
01:24:03,240 --> 01:24:09,080
and how it's actually um not a criticism of a type

1191
01:24:09,080 --> 01:24:11,640
of this work that does this particular thing.

1192
01:24:11,800 --> 01:24:16,730
But yeah, we are sometimes stuck with these very

1193
01:24:16,730 --> 01:24:22,570
cartoonish suggestions or pictures of what's wrong with

1194
01:24:22,570 --> 01:24:25,290
something or what science is really like.

1195
01:24:25,450 --> 01:24:30,970
And so maybe tackling it head on and just being like, you know, here's

1196
01:24:30,970 --> 01:24:31,530
exactly.

1197
01:24:31,610 --> 01:24:37,130
And sometimes it's difficult too to say exactly what's wrong with this

1198
01:24:37,450 --> 01:24:42,460
very just common view that's out there.

1199
01:24:42,620 --> 01:24:47,340
You see it with mechanism, the view that everything is caused by stuff at lower levels.

1200
01:24:47,500 --> 01:24:49,820
It's sort of like, how else could it be?

1201
01:24:50,140 --> 01:24:56,060
How could you how could you have any other way of giving an explanation or any other way

1202
01:24:56,060 --> 01:24:56,940
of causality?

1203
01:24:57,100 --> 01:25:02,910
And so being able to tackle those assumptions head

1204
01:25:03,070 --> 01:25:08,910
on, I think is a nice focus, both probably for scientific

1205
01:25:08,910 --> 01:25:11,470
contexts and then in in everyday life.

1206
01:25:11,790 --> 01:25:11,950
Yeah.

1207
01:25:12,190 --> 01:25:16,510
So like an example of that would be something like if you go to the doctor and your leg

1208
01:25:16,670 --> 01:25:22,030
circulation is bad, most people would want a physiological explanation and saying something

1209
01:25:22,030 --> 01:25:25,940
structural like you don't have public transportation, you're not walking enough.

1210
01:25:26,100 --> 01:25:30,420
Like those kinds of explanations just fall off the radar and people want just the

1211
01:25:30,420 --> 01:25:34,980
physiological, like what's happening in my veins for why I'm not having sufficient

1212
01:25:34,980 --> 01:25:35,700
circulation.

1213
01:25:36,260 --> 01:25:36,820
Oh sure.

1214
01:25:36,900 --> 01:25:40,500
Or suppose you have two different patients of two different races.

1215
01:25:40,660 --> 01:25:46,490
One of them is more um has higher blood pressure and is more stressed than the

1216
01:25:46,490 --> 01:25:50,090
other, and one of them experiences racism more than the other.

1217
01:25:50,250 --> 01:25:56,010
And you want to know why is it the case that you know the patients I'm

1218
01:25:56,010 --> 01:25:58,330
seeing that differ in terms of race?

1219
01:25:58,490 --> 01:26:03,130
Some of them have higher blood pressure, higher cortisol, they're more stressed out than

1220
01:26:03,130 --> 01:26:03,530
others.

1221
01:26:03,770 --> 01:26:09,690
And talking about their physiology isn't helpful because the main difference maker across

1222
01:26:09,740 --> 01:26:15,580
those white patients or the, you know, black or Mexican patients is the fact that they're

1223
01:26:15,580 --> 01:26:21,580
in these very different social situations, or they're experiencing racism differently,

1224
01:26:21,660 --> 01:26:23,660
or socioeconomic status.

1225
01:26:23,900 --> 01:26:29,660
So, yeah, it is partly finding those cases and being able to

1226
01:26:29,660 --> 01:26:33,420
show the justification and the rationale.

1227
01:26:34,060 --> 01:26:39,890
And it's still, it still requires

1228
01:26:39,890 --> 01:26:41,810
walking someone through carefully.

1229
01:26:41,970 --> 01:26:46,370
In some cases, they'll say it looks like downward causation, which is viewed as mysterious.

1230
01:26:46,530 --> 01:26:52,210
So yeah, there's all sorts of ways in which higher level causes producing lower

1231
01:26:52,290 --> 01:26:58,210
level outcomes is viewed as obscure or mysterious.

1232
01:26:58,370 --> 01:27:04,180
But yeah, that's exactly the kind of cases I'm thinking of, where you know,

1233
01:27:04,260 --> 01:27:09,620
a patient isn't buying their medication and they're said to be non-compliant, and you

1234
01:27:09,620 --> 01:27:13,300
realize they don't have the money to kind of buy the medication in the first place.

1235
01:27:13,460 --> 01:27:17,620
So why are they not taking their medication, their their choice?

1236
01:27:17,780 --> 01:27:23,540
So you blame the patient as opposed to, you know, the fact that they

1237
01:27:23,630 --> 01:27:27,150
can't afford the medication in the first place.

1238
01:27:27,310 --> 01:27:32,990
But yeah, it's worth these are sometimes called examples of cases where

1239
01:27:32,990 --> 01:27:36,830
physicians need to be have structural competency.

1240
01:27:36,990 --> 01:27:42,670
And so there's um there's been a push to include

1241
01:27:42,990 --> 01:27:46,350
this type of work in medical education.

1242
01:27:47,600 --> 01:27:53,040
Um, but you know, there's there's so many things that physicians need to

1243
01:27:53,040 --> 01:27:56,080
study and that are part of their education.

1244
01:27:56,240 --> 01:27:58,080
And the system is so big.

1245
01:27:58,240 --> 01:28:01,600
There's yeah, so there's lots of changes that it would be good to make.

1246
01:28:01,680 --> 01:28:06,480
But one of them, kind of related to what you're saying, one of them is to first show that

1247
01:28:06,480 --> 01:28:10,800
it even makes sense to think of these as causes that are explanatory, right?

1248
01:28:10,960 --> 01:28:15,490
Before you go intervene on them or before you go get data, you need to show that

1249
01:28:15,490 --> 01:28:17,010
conceptually this makes sense.

1250
01:28:17,250 --> 01:28:21,250
So maybe that's another similarity with your project where you're first saying, like, look,

1251
01:28:21,490 --> 01:28:25,650
for this question and for this explanatory target, this makes sense.

1252
01:28:25,810 --> 01:28:29,250
This is conceptually principled and justified.

1253
01:28:29,570 --> 01:28:35,410
And having social things as causes is perfectly fine.

1254
01:28:35,570 --> 01:28:36,370
Here's why.

1255
01:28:36,530 --> 01:28:38,370
It's similar to these other cases.

1256
01:28:38,530 --> 01:28:38,930
Yeah.

1257
01:28:39,170 --> 01:28:45,020
So maybe places where that conceptual and theoretical work is important

1258
01:28:45,180 --> 01:28:50,380
and where you're giving that justification, and where you can sometimes use it, you can

1259
01:28:50,380 --> 01:28:55,820
find other examples in other sciences that they're okay with the same

1260
01:28:55,820 --> 01:28:56,460
justification.

1261
01:28:56,700 --> 01:28:58,620
You kind of use it to support your view.

1262
01:28:58,780 --> 01:29:03,340
Where it's like, look, over here in physics, you're perfectly fine with these like

1263
01:29:03,340 --> 01:29:05,740
structural causes or constraints.

1264
01:29:05,980 --> 01:29:10,870
You should be fine with them over here too in the social sciences, where you got the same

1265
01:29:10,870 --> 01:29:11,430
kind of thing.

1266
01:29:11,670 --> 01:29:11,910
Yeah.

1267
01:29:12,710 --> 01:29:18,550
But yeah, maybe a little more of a I kind of want to

1268
01:29:18,550 --> 01:29:23,670
um push back on a on an earlier point you made about the um the how low can you go

1269
01:29:23,990 --> 01:29:29,830
perspective uh that um people often uh espouse in in philosophy of

1270
01:29:29,830 --> 01:29:30,390
science.

1271
01:29:30,550 --> 01:29:36,260
Um and I I want to defend a more limited version of the how low you can go uh thesis,

1272
01:29:36,500 --> 01:29:41,860
which is, you know, I agree that we don't want to be explaining uh jealousy or anger in

1273
01:29:41,860 --> 01:29:44,020
terms of quarks and electrons.

1274
01:29:44,260 --> 01:29:48,660
Um, but I do think that there is a defensible version of that hypothesis where you don't

1275
01:29:48,660 --> 01:29:53,300
want to necessarily go all the way down to the floor, but you do want to go at least one

1276
01:29:53,300 --> 01:29:54,580
level uh below you.

1277
01:29:54,660 --> 01:30:00,110
And you want to be at the place where you can pass the baton to the to the level below you,

1278
01:30:00,190 --> 01:30:05,790
um, such that you're not positing theories and mechanisms and explanatory factors that are

1279
01:30:05,790 --> 01:30:09,790
inconsistent with or incompatible with the lower the level below you.

1280
01:30:09,950 --> 01:30:14,750
So if I'm a microbiologist, I don't want to be positing uh microbiological structures that

1281
01:30:14,750 --> 01:30:19,310
are incompatible with what we know about chemistry and with what and with what molecules

1282
01:30:19,310 --> 01:30:20,270
are stable, right?

1283
01:30:20,350 --> 01:30:24,270
Similarly, if I'm a chemist, I don't want to be positing molecular structures that are

1284
01:30:24,270 --> 01:30:29,860
incompatible with what we know about how atoms work and interact with each other,

1285
01:30:30,100 --> 01:30:30,420
right?

1286
01:30:30,740 --> 01:30:35,540
And in the same way, if I'm positing psychological mechanisms, I don't want to be positing

1287
01:30:35,540 --> 01:30:40,740
mechanisms that are incompatible with what we know about how natural selection works or

1288
01:30:40,740 --> 01:30:44,500
with how information processing structures work, right?

1289
01:30:44,980 --> 01:30:49,780
And so I think w what our goals are, at least from our perspective in terms of evolutionary

1290
01:30:49,780 --> 01:30:55,090
psychology, is to get psychology and cognitive science in a place where we can be

1291
01:30:55,490 --> 01:31:01,170
putting forward ideas and theories and mechanisms that fit with and are

1292
01:31:01,170 --> 01:31:06,690
consistent with everything we know about evolutionary biology, about how biological systems

1293
01:31:06,690 --> 01:31:07,490
evolve.

1294
01:31:07,890 --> 01:31:13,420
And what Dave and I sometimes get frustrated with is theories in

1295
01:31:13,660 --> 01:31:19,500
psychology that are actually pretty incompatible with and inconsistent with things we

1296
01:31:19,500 --> 01:31:21,580
know about how evolution works.

1297
01:31:21,740 --> 01:31:22,060
Right.

1298
01:31:22,620 --> 01:31:27,980
A lot of the times we see people positing um theories of how the mind works that really

1299
01:31:27,980 --> 01:31:32,540
don't make a lot of evolutionary sense or that could not have plausibly evolved by natural

1300
01:31:32,540 --> 01:31:36,380
selection if you if you go through and do the do the game theory, like the strategy would

1301
01:31:36,380 --> 01:31:38,220
be defeated by this other strategy.

1302
01:31:38,700 --> 01:31:40,220
It's implausible that we have this.

1303
01:31:40,380 --> 01:31:46,090
Or a lot of the thinking in psychology views our psychological mechanisms uh in a kind of

1304
01:31:46,090 --> 01:31:48,570
intentional or in a kind of design stance.

1305
01:31:48,650 --> 01:31:50,090
But the design is wrong.

1306
01:31:50,170 --> 01:31:52,570
The function or the telos of the system is wrong.

1307
01:31:52,730 --> 01:31:58,090
The telos is framed as achieving happiness or uh mental well-being, as if there's a little

1308
01:31:58,090 --> 01:32:02,170
homunculus in the head that's pursuing a mental substance called happiness.

1309
01:32:02,330 --> 01:32:08,170
Uh, and that is the design criteria, where how how well does this uh system produce uh

1310
01:32:08,200 --> 01:32:10,360
the mental substance called happiness?

1311
01:32:10,600 --> 01:32:13,800
Is it maximizing feelings of well-being and good vibes?

1312
01:32:13,960 --> 01:32:16,520
And that's how we evaluate whether it's well designed or not.

1313
01:32:16,680 --> 01:32:20,040
When from an evolutionary perspective, that makes almost no sense at all.

1314
01:32:20,200 --> 01:32:25,960
To have a biological system that's engineered to seek out a substance within itself, it

1315
01:32:25,960 --> 01:32:30,600
makes more sense that the system would be uh designed to seek out something in the world

1316
01:32:30,600 --> 01:32:33,880
that uh facilitates its biological fitness.

1317
01:32:34,200 --> 01:32:39,990
Um so I want to get your take on whether you find that view plausible, that we

1318
01:32:39,990 --> 01:32:45,430
don't want to go down to the floor necessarily, but I think we should be working to go uh

1319
01:32:45,590 --> 01:32:50,950
uh the level below us so that we can meet up with the level below us and at least have a

1320
01:32:50,950 --> 01:32:55,110
kind of handshake or baton passing to the level below us.

1321
01:32:55,510 --> 01:32:59,670
Oh, that's so cool to think about.

1322
01:33:00,070 --> 01:33:05,980
And part of what it it captures for me is the

1323
01:33:05,980 --> 01:33:11,660
sense in which there are sometimes cases where we're interested in an

1324
01:33:11,660 --> 01:33:16,060
explanation or a theory where it needs to be compatible with something else.

1325
01:33:16,300 --> 01:33:21,340
Or it's a kind of game over situation, and you can use the fact that it's not compatible

1326
01:33:21,340 --> 01:33:26,250
with something else to say, look, guys, we have a problem here.

1327
01:33:27,050 --> 01:33:32,490
The question is, what counts as the thing it needs to be compatible with?

1328
01:33:32,730 --> 01:33:38,730
And I would say, why or does everything in

1329
01:33:38,730 --> 01:33:42,170
biology and social science need to be compatible with physics?

1330
01:33:42,410 --> 01:33:43,530
Does it need to be?

1331
01:33:43,770 --> 01:33:47,050
What would it why don't they need to be compatible with us?

1332
01:33:47,930 --> 01:33:52,820
Or so I think the question is we don't want to assume that

1333
01:33:53,140 --> 01:33:58,420
understanding things in biology or neuroscience or cognitive science or evolutionary

1334
01:33:58,420 --> 01:34:03,780
psychology, we wouldn't want to just assume that successful

1335
01:34:03,780 --> 01:34:08,100
explanations in those domains need to be compatible with lower level physics unless there's

1336
01:34:08,100 --> 01:34:09,620
a good reason for them to be.

1337
01:34:09,860 --> 01:34:12,500
I'm not sure we have that exactly.

1338
01:34:12,740 --> 01:34:18,100
I think we have an assumption that the world is layered and that lower things are more

1339
01:34:18,100 --> 01:34:23,790
fundamental or more um foundational and more

1340
01:34:23,790 --> 01:34:26,430
explanatory, but I think we need to question that.

1341
01:34:26,590 --> 01:34:31,310
We don't want to question that there's stuff down there in a just a physicalist picture.

1342
01:34:31,390 --> 01:34:32,750
No one should question that.

1343
01:34:32,990 --> 01:34:38,990
The question is whether it's explanatory for the higher level stuff, or do we need

1344
01:34:38,990 --> 01:34:41,550
to be compatible with fundamental physics?

1345
01:34:41,710 --> 01:34:44,590
We need a good reason for that without just assuming it.

1346
01:34:44,750 --> 01:34:50,320
I think your examples show cases where there is something

1347
01:34:50,960 --> 01:34:55,440
that is a standard that the theory needs to be compatible with.

1348
01:34:55,600 --> 01:35:00,000
I like your cases of the evolutionary considerations a lot.

1349
01:35:00,320 --> 01:35:04,800
And I wonder if there's other cases where you play the same kind of game in science, where

1350
01:35:04,800 --> 01:35:10,720
it's like, here's your theory, but if it's not compatible with this thing about chemical

1351
01:35:10,720 --> 01:35:16,670
reactions or with some other kind of like feature that we know

1352
01:35:16,670 --> 01:35:18,830
is present, then you have a problem.

1353
01:35:18,990 --> 01:35:24,670
I would just say I wouldn't assume that physics gets to play that

1354
01:35:24,670 --> 01:35:27,550
role for everything in the life sciences.

1355
01:35:28,030 --> 01:35:33,630
Um why not, you know, why not the other way around?

1356
01:35:34,270 --> 01:35:39,310
But then, yeah, so but I I think it I think there are cases where

1357
01:35:40,140 --> 01:35:46,140
lack of compatibility with another theory or another principle is a way

1358
01:35:46,140 --> 01:35:51,260
to say, like, look, there's something wrong here, or this isn't quite right.

1359
01:35:51,740 --> 01:35:57,660
I'm just more non-reductive in the sense that I don't assume physics gets to

1360
01:35:57,660 --> 01:36:03,180
be the rule that biologists and social scientists and

1361
01:36:03,340 --> 01:36:08,810
evolutionary psychologists need to always care about or follow.

1362
01:36:10,250 --> 01:36:12,730
And there's a lot more to say about that.

1363
01:36:14,330 --> 01:36:19,050
And that might even be resisting a kind of common picture or a default assumption.

1364
01:36:19,130 --> 01:36:25,130
The one thing I'll add is that I'm not denying that there are things at lower scales.

1365
01:36:25,290 --> 01:36:30,730
The question is does information about that stuff at lower scales constrain what you get to

1366
01:36:30,730 --> 01:36:32,890
say in the social sciences?

1367
01:36:33,210 --> 01:36:38,200
I wouldn't I don't want to assume it does, and I think there's lots of successful work in

1368
01:36:38,200 --> 01:36:43,240
all sorts of higher level sciences that's totally ignorant of fundamental physics and is

1369
01:36:43,240 --> 01:36:44,120
very successful.

1370
01:36:44,360 --> 01:36:49,640
So I wouldn't want to assume always we would need to be beholden to

1371
01:36:50,600 --> 01:36:55,970
physicists, but this kind of relates to debates about

1372
01:36:57,250 --> 01:36:57,250
it.

1373
01:37:02,850 --> 01:37:07,490
But I don't need I don't think that psychologists necessarily need to be beholden to

1374
01:37:07,490 --> 01:37:08,210
physicists.

1375
01:37:08,450 --> 01:37:11,810
I think they do in the sense that we don't want to posit theories that defy the laws of

1376
01:37:11,810 --> 01:37:12,210
physics.

1377
01:37:12,290 --> 01:37:16,440
Like I don't want to say that, you know, uh Superman is the cause of this thing and he can

1378
01:37:16,440 --> 01:37:20,360
fly without means of propulsion, or that there's some kind of telekinesis or whatever.

1379
01:37:20,440 --> 01:37:22,680
We don't want to act, you know, defy the laws of physics.

1380
01:37:22,840 --> 01:37:26,360
But I don't think we need to be constantly thinking about the laws of physics when we

1381
01:37:26,360 --> 01:37:28,920
construct our psychological theories.

1382
01:37:29,080 --> 01:37:34,600
But I think we do need to be thinking about um biology and evolution as a way of

1383
01:37:34,600 --> 01:37:37,960
constraining our theories in the same way that chemists, chemists need to be thinking about

1384
01:37:37,960 --> 01:37:41,400
physics and uh microbiologists need to be thinking about chemistry.

1385
01:37:42,470 --> 01:37:46,790
Yeah, I wonder if there's things at certain scales that you see and that you can capture,

1386
01:37:46,870 --> 01:37:48,390
but if you go down, you lose it.

1387
01:37:48,550 --> 01:37:53,270
Like some emergent phenomena are said to be like this: viscosity, or

1388
01:37:53,990 --> 01:37:59,990
there's some types of features that you can only kind of see or capture, supposedly, at

1389
01:37:59,990 --> 01:38:01,430
one sort of scale.

1390
01:38:01,670 --> 01:38:06,760
And once you go, when you go down, you actually don't get a better handle on things.

1391
01:38:06,920 --> 01:38:08,440
At least that's the suggestion.

1392
01:38:08,600 --> 01:38:11,480
But I wonder if it relates to the target, the explanatory target.

1393
01:38:11,640 --> 01:38:17,480
Are there some targets in chemistry where, I mean, you don't

1394
01:38:17,480 --> 01:38:22,840
want to, yeah, where you don't need to be beholden to physics.

1395
01:38:22,920 --> 01:38:26,040
But yeah, it's certainly, it's certainly worth considering more.

1396
01:38:26,280 --> 01:38:30,440
I think I do want to highlight the sense in which your the examples you give with

1397
01:38:30,440 --> 01:38:35,530
evolutionary considerations, I think those are those are quite nice.

1398
01:38:35,610 --> 01:38:39,530
It'd be interesting to look at other cases where you can play the same kind of game.

1399
01:38:39,770 --> 01:38:42,010
Um it's also helpful, right?

1400
01:38:42,170 --> 01:38:47,530
Because you can use that to show here, this theory is actually better than this other one

1401
01:38:47,690 --> 01:38:53,530
because it's compatible with our best understanding of evolutionary systems

1402
01:38:53,530 --> 01:38:54,730
and whatnot.

1403
01:38:55,160 --> 01:38:59,880
Yeah, I think like it motivates, like maybe there is a sense in which there the account

1404
01:38:59,880 --> 01:39:03,080
could be reasonable with respect to what we know about natural selection, but that

1405
01:39:03,080 --> 01:39:04,840
researcher hasn't articulated it.

1406
01:39:05,000 --> 01:39:09,560
Like that would be a first kind of pass take on it.

1407
01:39:09,720 --> 01:39:13,000
I'm very partial to David's take, but I will be devil's advocate too.

1408
01:39:13,080 --> 01:39:16,360
Like I think there, I'm not an expert in this, but there are examples in the history of

1409
01:39:16,360 --> 01:39:22,350
science where, for example, like DNA, the people DNA was a function first because I'm I

1410
01:39:22,350 --> 01:39:22,990
like function.

1411
01:39:23,070 --> 01:39:26,190
I'm a you know I'm a proselytizer of functional thinking.

1412
01:39:26,350 --> 01:39:31,150
Uh the functional think functional thinking started before there was evidence of what DNA

1413
01:39:31,150 --> 01:39:31,310
was.

1414
01:39:31,390 --> 01:39:36,510
And somebody was like, well, there has to be a molecule that can reproduce aspects of

1415
01:39:36,510 --> 01:39:38,430
itself with like near perfect fidelity.

1416
01:39:38,510 --> 01:39:40,270
And chemists were like, There's no such thing.

1417
01:39:40,430 --> 01:39:42,980
And they laughed at the person who said that.

1418
01:39:43,140 --> 01:39:47,140
So that was a good example of like at the time the chemists were saying that's not

1419
01:39:47,140 --> 01:39:51,860
consistent with what we know about how chemical substances work, but it was because they

1420
01:39:51,860 --> 01:39:56,340
hadn't discovered that one chemical substance that had that property, that functional

1421
01:39:56,340 --> 01:39:56,820
property.

1422
01:39:56,980 --> 01:40:02,740
So I do think like there's examples where I think this also happened in chemistry and

1423
01:40:02,740 --> 01:40:06,110
physics, where chemists were saying there were certain things that happened, and the

1424
01:40:06,110 --> 01:40:07,790
physics were like, Well, that's not consistent.

1425
01:40:07,870 --> 01:40:10,270
And actually, what changed was physics and not the chemistry.

1426
01:40:11,550 --> 01:40:12,190
So, yeah.

1427
01:40:12,350 --> 01:40:14,750
So, I think like I completely agree with David.

1428
01:40:14,910 --> 01:40:16,830
I think it's good to have those fights.

1429
01:40:17,070 --> 01:40:21,630
Um, and sometimes you can steel man, it's good to sort of steel man the non evolutionary

1430
01:40:21,630 --> 01:40:24,750
account into a the best case adaptationist account.

1431
01:40:24,910 --> 01:40:29,640
But I agree with David that there's just some things that they're almost imp they're not

1432
01:40:29,640 --> 01:40:30,760
even coherent, I guess.

1433
01:40:30,920 --> 01:40:33,880
They don't even like start, they don't even go out the get out of the gate.

1434
01:40:33,960 --> 01:40:35,480
You know, that's that's one way to put it.

1435
01:40:35,560 --> 01:40:35,720
Yeah.

1436
01:40:35,880 --> 01:40:41,320
Uh I I would love for psychology to be at the at the place where we could have a strong

1437
01:40:41,320 --> 01:40:44,680
enough body of evidence where we could contradict something in biology.

1438
01:40:44,840 --> 01:40:46,840
Where you could say, No, we have the better data.

1439
01:40:47,000 --> 01:40:49,160
You need to trust us and not the other way around.

1440
01:40:49,880 --> 01:40:52,680
Um, but I don't think we're we're anywhere close to that point.

1441
01:40:53,000 --> 01:40:54,760
Daryl Bem almost had us being psychic.

1442
01:40:55,750 --> 01:40:56,150
That's true.

1443
01:40:57,910 --> 01:40:58,550
Oh my gosh.

1444
01:40:58,790 --> 01:41:00,070
You almost turned everything around.

1445
01:41:00,310 --> 01:41:00,550
Yes.

1446
01:41:00,710 --> 01:41:02,310
Um, Lauren, is there anything?

1447
01:41:02,390 --> 01:41:05,030
Uh we're we're kind of but this has been so wonderful.

1448
01:41:05,110 --> 01:41:09,110
I feel like we should we should have you on again, but um, we're coming up on our usual

1449
01:41:09,110 --> 01:41:09,830
timing here.

1450
01:41:09,990 --> 01:41:12,230
Um, is there anything about your own work?

1451
01:41:12,470 --> 01:41:17,960
Because you know, we really uh we selfishly sort of um again, this was our therapy session

1452
01:41:18,280 --> 01:41:21,240
with you, but um, is there anything about your own work?

1453
01:41:21,320 --> 01:41:25,960
Um, both in terms of like your work or your books that are coming out, or things for people

1454
01:41:25,960 --> 01:41:31,400
who are interested in philosophy of science or causation, in particular what you're doing,

1455
01:41:31,560 --> 01:41:34,920
that you might want to point people toward, or is there something we should have talked to

1456
01:41:34,920 --> 01:41:36,360
you about or you'd like to mention?

1457
01:41:36,440 --> 01:41:36,840
Yeah.

1458
01:41:37,480 --> 01:41:43,450
Oh, um nothing that we should have discussed but didn't get to,

1459
01:41:43,770 --> 01:41:49,690
lots of great topics and a nice discussion that starts to kind of unpack

1460
01:41:49,770 --> 01:41:54,410
also what philosophers of science are up to and what they're interested in.

1461
01:41:54,810 --> 01:41:59,290
The um yeah, so maybe I'll just briefly mention

1462
01:42:00,860 --> 01:42:03,420
Um a couple things.

1463
01:42:04,060 --> 01:42:09,900
So I have a book that was recently published, Cambridge Elements book.

1464
01:42:09,980 --> 01:42:12,140
It's called Explanation in Biology.

1465
01:42:12,380 --> 01:42:17,740
It discusses different types of causal explanation and non-causal explanation.

1466
01:42:18,300 --> 01:42:24,060
If people are interested in mechanism, there's a paper that Danny Bassett and I wrote in

1467
01:42:24,050 --> 01:42:29,170
Nature Reviews Neuroscience called Causation in Neuroscience Keeping Mechanism Meaningful.

1468
01:42:29,410 --> 01:42:33,570
So there we talk about different notions of mechanism in the field of neuroscience.

1469
01:42:33,810 --> 01:42:37,170
It's similar to notions in other scientific domains.

1470
01:42:37,410 --> 01:42:39,410
So there's that paper if there's interest.

1471
01:42:39,490 --> 01:42:45,170
And then yeah, just to highlight part of what we discussed, um,

1472
01:42:45,410 --> 01:42:50,980
philosophers of science in this space are interested in capturing real types of

1473
01:42:50,980 --> 01:42:56,260
explanations that scientists provide, but also the standards that they need to meet.

1474
01:42:56,580 --> 01:43:02,420
And we now, in current work in philosophy of science, are more pluralist about what

1475
01:43:02,420 --> 01:43:02,820
counts.

1476
01:43:02,900 --> 01:43:07,780
It used to be the case that philosophers were looking for the one single way that

1477
01:43:07,780 --> 01:43:09,140
explanations worked.

1478
01:43:09,380 --> 01:43:15,310
And now, fortunately, we're more under the view that there's different

1479
01:43:15,310 --> 01:43:16,910
types of legitimate explanations.

1480
01:43:17,070 --> 01:43:22,750
Our discussion has nicely kind of supported that kind of view where there's different

1481
01:43:22,750 --> 01:43:27,470
explanatory targets or why questions, and then just different steps you take to answer that

1482
01:43:27,470 --> 01:43:30,750
why question and to give an explanation.

1483
01:43:30,990 --> 01:43:36,350
And then, yeah, just final things to note for why that matters that came up in our

1484
01:43:36,350 --> 01:43:36,990
discussion.

1485
01:43:37,230 --> 01:43:40,030
We want to know when explanations are good or bad.

1486
01:43:40,190 --> 01:43:45,460
And so you need standards to be able to say when they're good

1487
01:43:45,540 --> 01:43:47,300
explanations, when they don't count.

1488
01:43:47,460 --> 01:43:53,460
We need that for the public too, because there's lots of conspiracy theory types

1489
01:43:53,460 --> 01:43:58,260
of topics and explanations that are inconsistent with scientific work.

1490
01:43:58,340 --> 01:44:03,890
And so scientists need to be able to tell the public why we think that X

1491
01:44:03,970 --> 01:44:06,370
explains Y and what the rationale is.

1492
01:44:06,610 --> 01:44:11,330
So it's important for those discussions, but also as we mentioned, for the standards in

1493
01:44:11,330 --> 01:44:15,810
science for pay for the standards that determine the papers that are published, the

1494
01:44:15,810 --> 01:44:17,090
research that's funded.

1495
01:44:17,250 --> 01:44:22,610
And when you're making progress in science, like we're talking about, being able to say,

1496
01:44:22,850 --> 01:44:28,380
look, here is this explanatory program that I'm

1497
01:44:28,380 --> 01:44:31,820
operating within, and it's different from this other one.

1498
01:44:31,980 --> 01:44:35,340
It's important for making progress in science.

1499
01:44:35,580 --> 01:44:41,500
So, yeah, a lot of interest here in capturing distinct types of explanation,

1500
01:44:41,740 --> 01:44:47,020
what their standards are, and then the justification and rationale for viewing them as

1501
01:44:47,020 --> 01:44:52,540
explanatory as opposed to merely descriptive or predictive or just

1502
01:44:52,540 --> 01:44:58,270
classifying and showing how it um they're

1503
01:44:58,430 --> 01:45:03,950
they may be serving different goals and how they do have justification to kind of capture

1504
01:45:03,950 --> 01:45:07,070
how science is giving us our best understanding of the world.

1505
01:45:07,230 --> 01:45:09,230
So yeah, just a little bit of recap.

1506
01:45:09,470 --> 01:45:15,230
Very happy to talk more at future points and

1507
01:45:15,230 --> 01:45:18,320
bring in more philosophy of science if it's ever of interest.

1508
01:45:18,640 --> 01:45:19,360
Yeah, that'd be great.

1509
01:45:19,440 --> 01:45:24,000
I mean, I think this conversation has been a beautiful, nice microcosm of I think it's

1510
01:45:24,000 --> 01:45:25,440
really a productive thing.

1511
01:45:25,600 --> 01:45:31,520
It's it's fun for us to think about that there are other people who have tackled

1512
01:45:31,520 --> 01:45:33,280
these issues and we don't have to do it on our own.

1513
01:45:33,440 --> 01:45:38,960
But then it's also helpful in clarifying um uh to hear what

1514
01:45:38,960 --> 01:45:41,130
those precedents are.

1515
01:45:41,370 --> 01:45:46,410
And um, and I hope it was helpful for you to see what mess we're in

1516
01:45:47,130 --> 01:45:47,770
ourselves.

1517
01:45:47,930 --> 01:45:53,370
Um, but yeah, no, um, we as we mentioned before we started, we're all local, and um there's

1518
01:45:53,370 --> 01:45:56,810
a lot of evolutionary behavioral scientists in the Southern California area.

1519
01:45:56,970 --> 01:46:02,730
And I think it would be lovely to have a philosophy of science and evolutionary sort of um

1520
01:46:03,050 --> 01:46:06,010
um uh some get together or something like that.

1521
01:46:06,090 --> 01:46:08,090
Um, I think that would be that would be fantastic.

1522
01:46:08,250 --> 01:46:09,610
So that sounds great.

1523
01:46:09,780 --> 01:46:10,260
Yeah.

1524
01:46:10,580 --> 01:46:12,500
So uh Lauren, thank you so much.

1525
01:46:12,660 --> 01:46:18,660
Um uh it was a pleasure and um yeah, I I look forward to talking more um uh with

1526
01:46:18,660 --> 01:46:20,260
you and other philosophers.

1527
01:46:20,340 --> 01:46:26,100
It's it's a real treat and um we always appreciate having I think David put it, um I love

1528
01:46:26,100 --> 01:46:28,420
talking to philosophers, they're so clear-minded.

1529
01:46:28,500 --> 01:46:29,780
I think is that what you said, David?

1530
01:46:30,020 --> 01:46:30,180
Yes.

1531
01:46:30,980 --> 01:46:31,460
Yes.

1532
01:46:32,340 --> 01:46:35,460
Um well yeah, it was a total pleasure for me.

1533
01:46:35,620 --> 01:46:37,910
So thank you so much for having me on.

1534
01:46:38,070 --> 01:46:44,070
And yeah, loved learning more about the work and uh debates in

1535
01:46:44,070 --> 01:46:44,710
your field.

1536
01:46:44,870 --> 01:46:46,390
So yeah, thank you for that.

1537
01:46:46,630 --> 01:46:47,510
Yeah, thank you, Lauren.

1538
01:46:47,750 --> 01:46:49,030
It was fantastic.

1539
01:46:52,390 --> 01:46:54,790
David, that just flew by like usual.

1540
01:46:55,030 --> 01:46:56,150
Yep, it always does.

1541
01:46:56,230 --> 01:46:56,470
Yeah.

1542
01:46:56,710 --> 01:46:57,270
Time flies.

1543
01:46:57,590 --> 01:46:59,750
So there's probably work on time perception.

1544
01:46:59,830 --> 01:47:05,340
Um, I mean, I know there's work on time perception and how it gets, you know, expanded or

1545
01:47:05,340 --> 01:47:06,300
contracted.

1546
01:47:06,780 --> 01:47:07,100
Yeah.

1547
01:47:07,260 --> 01:47:08,700
I I haven't really read much about it.

1548
01:47:08,780 --> 01:47:13,420
It seems like a really interesting uh uh topic for an evolutionary psychologist to dive

1549
01:47:13,420 --> 01:47:13,660
into.

1550
01:47:14,060 --> 01:47:16,140
I got contacted by a grad student.

1551
01:47:16,220 --> 01:47:17,740
Um shout out to you.

1552
01:47:17,900 --> 01:47:23,500
Um I'm not gonna mention names but but somebody's thinking about it um uh who's uh who's at

1553
01:47:23,500 --> 01:47:28,940
Fullerton um oh cool with Patrick Durkey and it's a wonderful uh

1554
01:47:29,100 --> 01:47:34,810
idea and um um she reached out to contact me about if she knew if anybody was doing it

1555
01:47:34,970 --> 01:47:39,370
i'm not aware but yeah the an adaptationist approach to time perception is fantastic so

1556
01:47:39,370 --> 01:47:41,770
please keep I would love I would love to read that paper.

1557
01:47:42,010 --> 01:47:43,370
So please write it so I can read it.

1558
01:47:43,770 --> 01:47:46,090
So yes you're please keep going.

1559
01:47:46,250 --> 01:47:50,170
Uh you're you're on the right track for for what my two cents is worth.

1560
01:47:50,250 --> 01:47:52,970
So yes it would be about time.

1561
01:47:53,380 --> 01:47:54,340
Oh my goodness.

1562
01:47:55,380 --> 01:47:56,900
You are a professional comedian.

1563
01:47:57,460 --> 01:47:58,020
I sure am.

1564
01:47:58,340 --> 01:48:00,500
Uh as George Carlin once put it.

1565
01:48:00,580 --> 01:48:02,660
Um that was one of his bits, right?

1566
01:48:02,980 --> 01:48:06,820
I'm a professional comedian and like the people in your around the water cooler, which I

1567
01:48:06,820 --> 01:48:07,940
don't think it's true anymore.

1568
01:48:08,180 --> 01:48:08,740
But yeah.

1569
01:48:08,980 --> 01:48:09,300
Yeah.

1570
01:48:09,700 --> 01:48:10,660
Um okay.

1571
01:48:11,140 --> 01:48:14,980
Um Patreon, uh, go check out the show notes.

1572
01:48:15,140 --> 01:48:18,820
Lots of cool up the there should be a lot of good show notes for for this episode.

1573
01:48:18,980 --> 01:48:24,410
Lauren talked about a bunch of uh her work, a book, and other other such things.

1574
01:48:24,570 --> 01:48:26,810
I don't know, do you have been anything else?

1575
01:48:27,290 --> 01:48:27,930
Uh no.

1576
01:48:28,010 --> 01:48:29,450
I mean leave us a kind review.

1577
01:48:29,690 --> 01:48:31,770
Say nice things about us on social media.

1578
01:48:31,930 --> 01:48:35,050
Tell a friend about this uh wonderful podcast.

1579
01:48:35,210 --> 01:48:39,530
Uh anything you can do to support us so that you can keep hearing our wonderful voices in

1580
01:48:39,530 --> 01:48:40,010
your ear.

1581
01:48:40,330 --> 01:48:42,570
I think we really should get t shirts.

1582
01:48:42,890 --> 01:48:43,370
Yeah?

1583
01:48:43,610 --> 01:48:44,250
Yeah.

1584
01:48:44,740 --> 01:48:50,660
But really just I would, especially if it was a black t-shirt with like subtle font

1585
01:48:50,740 --> 01:48:53,620
um where it was just the podcast.

1586
01:48:54,420 --> 01:48:55,140
Just the podcast?

1587
01:48:55,460 --> 01:48:56,660
Yeah, just in parentheses.

1588
01:48:58,260 --> 01:49:02,100
Although we'd have to make sure that there isn't a podcast that's just called the podcast

1589
01:49:02,180 --> 01:49:03,140
in parentheses.

1590
01:49:03,220 --> 01:49:04,340
Um, but yeah.

1591
01:49:04,580 --> 01:49:05,700
Maybe that's too subtle.

1592
01:49:05,780 --> 01:49:06,100
I don't know.

1593
01:49:06,180 --> 01:49:07,060
What do you think?

1594
01:49:07,350 --> 01:49:09,030
I think that might be a bit subtle.

1595
01:49:09,270 --> 01:49:12,550
It's weird though, because if it was too big and in your face, I'd probably be too be

1596
01:49:12,550 --> 01:49:13,270
embarrassed to wear it.

1597
01:49:13,750 --> 01:49:14,310
Yeah, I know.

1598
01:49:14,390 --> 01:49:17,350
I kind of don't want to wear an evolutionary psychology shirt because I'm gonna walk by and

1599
01:49:17,590 --> 01:49:20,230
be like, oh, that guy's a jerk because he's an evolutionary psychologist.

1600
01:49:20,310 --> 01:49:24,310
So yeah, I don't want to get eggs thrown at me and tomatoes.

1601
01:49:25,270 --> 01:49:30,150
In the in the pro in the professional literature of stigma, it's a remote, it's a um it's a

1602
01:49:30,150 --> 01:49:33,110
concealable stigma of being an evolutionary psychologist.

1603
01:49:33,270 --> 01:49:39,040
Unlike, you know, being a member of a racial minority or a physical

1604
01:49:39,360 --> 01:49:42,640
deformity, for example, where you can't remove it.

1605
01:49:43,520 --> 01:49:48,800
Being a kind of scientist is not something people can readily perceive to the extent that

1606
01:49:48,800 --> 01:49:51,360
it's a stigmatized thing among some people.

1607
01:49:52,240 --> 01:49:52,960
That is true.

1608
01:49:53,120 --> 01:49:58,610
And so we gotta, you know, be patient about revealing it in the right

1609
01:49:58,850 --> 01:49:59,330
setting.

1610
01:49:59,730 --> 01:50:03,890
And this is a safe space for us to um to reveal our stigmatized identity.

1611
01:50:04,370 --> 01:50:07,090
Maybe this is just a long walk to face tattoos, but I don't know.

1612
01:50:07,170 --> 01:50:08,050
Maybe maybe we shouldn't.

1613
01:50:08,210 --> 01:50:09,170
Yeah, that'd be pretty cool.

1614
01:50:09,410 --> 01:50:10,290
Okay, yeah.

1615
01:50:10,690 --> 01:50:15,170
Uh that's an adjective I wouldn't use, but it's it's an idea.

1616
01:50:15,250 --> 01:50:15,490
Yeah.

1617
01:50:15,810 --> 01:50:17,330
I mean it would be a very costly signal.

1618
01:50:17,570 --> 01:50:21,170
We'd only get the most loyal, devoted evolutionary psychologists.

1619
01:50:21,570 --> 01:50:23,570
Somebody does face tattoo uh work.

1620
01:50:23,810 --> 01:50:24,400
Is it Louis?

1621
01:50:24,640 --> 01:50:25,760
I think is it Louie?

1622
01:50:26,720 --> 01:50:32,720
I think there was a Dan Fessler paper on commitment signals and tattoos was I don't know if

1623
01:50:32,720 --> 01:50:34,560
there's more work on this, but I remember reading.

1624
01:50:35,040 --> 01:50:39,280
If you see somebody with a face tattoo about something, you know that they're committed to

1625
01:50:39,280 --> 01:50:39,760
that thing.

1626
01:50:40,080 --> 01:50:45,280
I think there's stuff on like prisons where they have prison tattoos to like signal what

1627
01:50:45,360 --> 01:50:46,480
gang you're a part of.

1628
01:50:46,800 --> 01:50:47,040
Yeah.

1629
01:50:47,360 --> 01:50:48,000
I don't know.

1630
01:50:48,160 --> 01:50:50,830
But yeah, no, uh I think we should do face tattoos.

1631
01:50:50,990 --> 01:50:56,430
I think um I think we'll we'll uh we'll filter out all the uncommitted evolutionary

1632
01:50:56,430 --> 01:50:56,910
psychologists.

1633
01:50:57,230 --> 01:50:58,110
Like myself.

1634
01:50:58,430 --> 01:50:59,470
Yeah, exactly.

1635
01:51:00,270 --> 01:51:02,910
Would you get a would you really get a face tattoo, David?

1636
01:51:03,870 --> 01:51:05,310
Are we joking or serious?

1637
01:51:05,550 --> 01:51:06,190
Seriously no.

1638
01:51:06,350 --> 01:51:12,270
Joking is uh so if somebody wants to start a club where

1639
01:51:12,270 --> 01:51:15,630
you demand a face tattoo, you might be a member of that club yourself.

1640
01:51:15,790 --> 01:51:16,830
So um yeah.

1641
01:51:16,990 --> 01:51:17,390
Yeah.

1642
01:51:17,720 --> 01:51:18,040
All right.

1643
01:51:18,200 --> 01:51:18,680
Anyway.

1644
01:51:18,920 --> 01:51:19,480
All right.

1645
01:51:19,880 --> 01:51:20,840
I don't know how we got there.

1646
01:51:21,080 --> 01:51:21,880
It was, it was, yeah.

1647
01:51:22,040 --> 01:51:22,840
Enjoy your week.

1648
01:51:22,920 --> 01:51:24,520
Um, enjoy the summer.

1649
01:51:24,760 --> 01:51:30,680
And um, you know, uh, I think a good lesson from this conversation is

1650
01:51:30,920 --> 01:51:36,520
if somebody if you disagree with somebody or think somebody is wrong, think about how they

1651
01:51:36,520 --> 01:51:40,440
might be explaining something different than what you're trying to explain.

1652
01:51:40,680 --> 01:51:41,320
Yep.

1653
01:51:41,690 --> 01:51:43,370
Great, beautiful advice.

1654
01:51:43,690 --> 01:51:44,730
Go forth and use it.

1655
01:51:44,810 --> 01:51:45,290
Take care.

1656
01:51:45,450 --> 01:51:46,010
See you next week.

1657
01:51:46,250 --> 01:51:47,450
See you next week.

1658
01:52:10,020 --> 01:52:10,980
Pontum Pon P,

1659
01:52:16,660 --> 01:52:22,340
and Canton, Pontum, Pantum,

1660
01:52:23,300 --> 01:52:27,780
Pont, Pontum, Pontum, Canton,