Ulysses and the Sirens
Ulysses and the Sirens
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尤利西斯与塞壬
DOI：
10.1111/j.1468-0149.1980.tb01864.x
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发表时间：
1980
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Flint Schier
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Flint Schier
埃尔斯特的书以一种见多识广、智慧和启发的方式讨论并联系了许多令人着迷的主题：社会生物学、社会科学中的功能解释、个人和社会变化的模式、预先承诺、时间偏好、战略理性、行为的最大化和满足模式、爱、恨和自欺欺人。这本书的第一部分包含了在解释文化进化中使用生物模型的最好的讨论之一。埃尔斯特定义了“功能解释”，然后辩称，在社会科学中，成功的功能解释即使有，也很少。他从这一点转移到声称社会科学中的生物无用是无菌的。埃尔斯特说，如果一个人从X对X客户未被认识到的有益影响的角度来解释X，那么就给出了X的功能解释。这有两个问题。首先，这并不完全类似于达尔文的解释，因为“有益的影响”是模糊的，而且受益的不是X，而是X的客户。达尔文对迷因的解释(引用道金的术语)将从它对自身生存机会的影响来解释X。其次，根据埃尔斯特的定义，异常因果链存在一个问题。埃尔斯特一度正确地驳斥了这样一种说法，即冷漠可以通过它对政治体系的稳定作用来解释，这是正确的，因为它是疯狂的。然而，这种冷漠将是自我维持的：冷漠将稳定下来，稳定将增加冷漠。这里有一种可疑的东西：冷漠并不是因为它的稳定作用的好处而维持自己，而是因为一种无与伦比的
Elster’s book discusses and connects in an informed, intelligent and suggestive way a bewitching number of topics: sociobiology, functional explanation in the social sciences, modes of personal and social change, precommitment, time-preference, strategic rationality, maximizing and satisficing models of behaviour, love, hate and self-deception. The first part of the book contains one of the best discussions going of the use of biological models in the explanation of cultural evolution. Elster defines ‘functional explanation’and then argues that there are few, if any, successful functional explanations in the social sciences. He moves from this to the claim that biological anaIogies in the social sciences are sterile.Elster says that one has given a functional explanation of an X if one accounts for X in terms of X’s unrecognized beneficial effects on X’s clients. There are two problems with this. First, this is not really properly analogous to a Darwinian explanation since ‘beneficial effects’ is left vague and since the benefits accrue not to X but to X’s clients. A Darwinian explanation of a meme (to use Dawkin’s term) would explain X in terms of its effects on its own chances for survival. Second, on Elster’s definition there is a problem with deviant causal chains. At one point Elster rightly dismisses as mad the suggestion that apathy could be explained by its stabilizing effect on a political system. Yet such apathy would be selfsustaining: the apathy would stabilize, and the stability would increase apathy. There is something fishy here: apathy does not maintain itself because of the goodness of its stabilizing effect, but because of an irrele-