One response to these options was the formulation
of "grand theories:". History is, of course, littered with obsolete
or forgotten "-isms", "-ics" and "-ologies". And new ones are being
created all the time. Some are short-lived, others rather stable
and long-lasting. Often they claim for themselves the status of "separate
disciplines".
There can be intellectual reasons for this reflected
in the way in which we bootstrap ourselves from our common-sense ways of
perceiving and understanding the world into the creation of the sciences.
This is seen, for instance, in the extraordinarily wide-ranging work of
Aristotle, who created, four centuries before the common era, many of the
disciplines which we recognize today, and viewed each of them as having
a distinct subject-matter and purpose and method (e.g. economics, ethics,
psychology, logic, political theory, rhetoric, zoology, anatomy, botany,
physics, astronomy, linguistics, legal theory, chemistry, mathematics).
[See the work of Scott Atran.]
But there can also be psychological and social reasons
to claim disciplinary distinctness: it creates networks of solidarity;
it can make it easier to obtain resources (salaries, research grants, etc.),
and to obtain the ear of those in power. At the individual level,
it can be satisfying and advantageous to belong to or to be a leading or
founding figure in such a group.
Some grand theories, such as Functionalism in sociology,
claim the autonomy of the social. Some, such as methodological individualism,
claim the priority of the psychological. Some, such as sociobiology,
claim the priority of the biological. Some, such as Marxism, claim
the priority of the economic base.
Such grand theories have led to interesting work
and insights, and the clashes between them have also often been fruitful.
But it is safer to be suspicious of Grand Theories. The grander they
are, the more dangerous they may be. These dangers are not only intellectual,
but sometimes practical. (Consider, for instance, racist
theories).
"Autonomy", being independent or self-ruling, is an ideal at which some disciplines have sometimes aimed, the most notable example being pure mathematics. But probably this is an unrealistic or undesirable ideal. It may be enough to aim at a consistent set of assumptions, concepts and methods about a subject-matter which has been at least provisionally identified. Assumptions, of course, are corrigible, and, sometimes correspondingly, the scope of the subject-matter may change.
The claim that biology has its own subject-matter, distinct from other sciences, and that it has its own (various) methods and approaches, makes good sense. We probably have an inbuilt capacity or tendency to distinguish living things, and the sciences that have been developed from this common-sense basis have important theoretical and practical achievements. But all this has sometimes given rise to the idea that living matter is governed by a special principle or force which is beyond the reach of physics or chemistry. Not many scientists would today accept this idea, but it is still wide-spread. We find in many cultures, including Chinese culture, a popular belief in a kind of "breath of life", which is supposed to underly and animate the living, which has given rise to quasi-theoretical speculations, and which can govern medical practice and other activities. If such beliefs are ever useful, it is not because they constitute a real theory, but for other reasons, which we shall not pursue here. (Compare the Greek word psuche, spirit or soul [perhaps derived from the word meaning to breathe], with the Chinese qì, breath, vital spirit.)
Similar considerations apply to the psychological. Clearly, psychology has various kinds of work of its own to do which cannot be done by other disciplines. On the other hand, does it have its own "ontology" ? Etymologically, psychology is the study of bodies which have "souls", or of those souls themselves. This is another kind of "vitalism" analogous to the one we have described above, which also persists variously in common ways of thinking, but again does not constitute a real theory.
Again, similar considerations apply to the social domain. Durkheim took the view that social facts were sui generis. And he argued that societies had what he called collective representations such as language, material culture, group emotions, currency, professional practices, myths, etc. which coerced individual consciousness. See Durkheim and Mauss's Primitive Classification, which includes a discussion of fung seui. This led to the influential functionalist approach explicit in Malinowski, which is based on the premise that social phenomena such as those mentioned above should be explained by discovering their function in maintaining the social order,
A different view from autonomy/reduction is that we should consider how the sciences are articulated. The underlying analogy here is the "articulation" of bones in a skeleton. The OED defines "articulation" as "the structure or mechanism whereby two bones, or two parts of the invertebrate skeleton, are connected, whether stiffly, or in such a way that one moves in or on the other." So we have questions like how do different sciences fit together, support each other, operate in connection with or move relative to each other ...
Sociobiology attempts to provide an account of human
cultures and dispositions by the direct application of evolutionary theory.
It attempts to explain why certain kinds of behaviour occur by saying that
they have a selective advantage for the members of the species in which
they occur. A great deal of work has been done on this which varies
from the excellent to the atrocious.
It can be inflated when it tries to deal with too
much too globally. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth
century took the view that human beings were basically aggressive, and
we must understand and explain the existence and the form of civil society
in light of this fact. But is it a fact? How could we set about
showing that it is true ? Some popular sociobiologists make up evolutionary
stories about the importance to early humans of aggressiveness. The
trouble is that these stories are too speculative. More important,
we should notice that the scope of instinct in human behaviour is limited
(even if important). Most complex forms of human behaviour, even
where they have an instinctual base, are learned and many are improvised.
This means that "no culture is hard-wired into any human being".
How then is it transmitted, and could evolutionary explanations nevertheless
apply to it ?
Here is some relevant reading:
J. Diamond: The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. An attempt at an evolutionary biology of man.
J. Maynard Smith: 'Game Theory and the Evolution of Behaviour' in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 7, 95-125 (1984)
M. Ridley: The Red Queen. Human and animal reproduction and mate choice.
M. Andersson: Sexual selection
L. Betzig et al.: Human reproductive behaviour
H. Cronin: The ant and the peacock
R.I.M. Dunbar: Primate social systems
J.R. Krebs and N.B.Davies: An introduction to behavioural ecology (2nd/3rd Edition)
Trivers: Social Evolution
There is also a large bibliography on the evolution of cooperation by
Robert Axelrod at
http://www.ipps.lsa.umich.edu/ipps/papers/coop/Evol_of_Coop_Bibliography.txt.