| Phi 109 Spring 2016 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
Kim Sterelny (1950-) is an Australian philosopher whose focus has been the philosophy of biology. His focus here is an area on the border of anthropology and biology, and you’ll see some connections with the experimental economics discussed by Sugden.
Sterelny’s work is on the border between philosophy and the social sciences. He will describe the actual content of work on the evolution of culture for its own sake and not merely as an example of some point about the nature of the social sciences or their method. However, you will notice that, while the work he describes may involve mathematical models or anthropological research, Sterelny focuses on features of the concepts arising in this work, and that is characteristic of philosophical work that borders on theoretical work in the sciences.
In this first assignment, which represents a little over half the paper, Sterelny discusses issues arising in the work of Peter Richerson (1943-) and Robert Boyd (1948-), ending with a summary on pp. 151f. Sections 1–2 amount to Sterelny’s introduction and the following §§ 3–5 lay out the approach due to Boyd and Richerson.
Sterelny will initially assume familiarity with terms from biology you may not know (and, if he does, you should look them), but the bulk of his discussion of cultural evolution is self-contained. I’ll comment only on two features of his vocabulary that may not be immediately apparent.
• Although he suggests (on p. 140) that he will use the term ‘cultural variant’ rather than ‘meme’ for cultural ideas that may be transmitted from one individual to another, he will actually use ‘meme’ quite often. My guess is that he uses the latter term in connection with what he calls (again on p. 140) a “meme-like” flow across generations.
• Sterelny will speak often of theoretical models, but notice that he uses the term ‘model’ also for a person who serves as a source of information by being imitated by someone else, who he calls a “mimic.”
Let me also note one feature of the relation between “culturally acquired information” and “information acquired by trial-and-error” (see the beginning of §5 on p. 148). Someone who wished to think solely in terms of a “trial-and-error” learning guided by biologically inherited psychological capacities might see learning from others as a special case of learning from the world. That is, one’s culture might not be something that is inherited in a way somewhat analogous to genetic inheritance (as a dual-inheritance view would have it) but simply a feature of one’s environment.