Organism, Evolution, and the Social Environment in American Philosophy

这个项目是为了支持一本关于美国实用主义者和十九世纪后期生物学的书的研究。这位研究人员正在建立一个论点，以表明实用主义的哲学传统在19世纪末的特定生物学辩论中欠下了巨大的债务，特别是那些关于环境在发展和进化中的作用的辩论。他引用了那个时期出版的著作以及大量的档案证据来证明自己的观点。这个项目对社会的主要潜在好处是改变关于生物学和社会世界之间关系的对话。目前关于这种关系的讨论主要是由社会生物学家和进化心理学家主导的，他们的工作受到了科学哲学家的严厉批评。实用主义提供了另一种模式：尽管从根本上说，我们是改变和被我们的环境改变的有机体，但在科学、伦理和教育的背景下，重要的环境是社会性的，因此与这些背景直接相关的是社会科学而不是生物学。这项研究项目将证明，如果不理解实用主义及其与生物学的联系，我们就无法完全理解实用主义及其影响。例如，实用主义者将有机体与环境的二分法作为一种抽象的框架手段，将其应用于逻辑、伦理学甚至美学中。这种生物-环境框架将生物学、哲学和社会科学结合在一起，产生了开创性的工作，如W.E.B.Du Bois的《费城黑人》(1899)，他认为费城黑人社区的许多问题是由于他们的社会环境造成的。实用主义哲学家在从教育到社会学的一系列领域都有影响力。威廉·詹姆斯在哈佛开设了第一个致力于心理学教学的美国实验室后，出版了该学科最有影响力的教科书之一；直言不讳的进步教育倡导者约翰·杜威在芝加哥大学创建了现在被称为实验室的学校；社会心理学之父之一乔治·赫伯特·米德推动了符号互动主义的社会学方法。通过揭示其起源于19世纪的生物学，这个项目有望改变我们对美国实用主义的理解，并增强我们对社会环境关键作用的理解。

General Audience Summary This project is to support research for a book on the American pragmatists and late-nineteenth-century biology. The researcher is building an argument to show that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. He is drawing from both published writings from the period as well as extensive archival evidence to make his case. The main potential benefit to society of this project is to change the conversation about the relationship between biology and the social world. The current conversation about this relationship is dominated by socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists, whose work has been roundly criticized by philosophers of science. Pragmatism provides an alternative model: Although we are, fundamentally, organisms modifying and being modified by our environments, in the contexts of science, ethics, and education, the environments that matter are social, and thus it is social science rather than biology that bears directly on these contexts.Technical Summary This research project will demonstrate that we cannot fully understand pragmatism and its influence without understanding its connection to biology. For example, the pragmatists used the dichotomy of "organism and environment" as an abstract framing device, applying it in logic, ethics, and even aesthetics. This organism-environment framework brought together biology, philosophy, and the social sciences, resulting in pioneering work such as that of W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which argued that many of the problems of the black community in Philadelphia were due to their social environment. The pragmatist philosophers were influential across a range of fields, from education to sociology. William James, after opening the first United States laboratory devoted to the teaching of psychology at Harvard, published one of the discipline's most influential textbooks; John Dewey, an outspoken champion of progressive education, founded what is now known as the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago; George Herbert Mead, one of the fathers of social psychology, motivated the sociological approach of symbolic interactionism. By revealing its roots in nineteenth-century biology, this project promises to transform our understanding of American pragmatism, and to enhance our understanding of the critical role of social environments.