Response to Baer and Bositis

Abstract

Baer and Bositis's openness in taking biology seriously is welcome and refreshing. For good reasons and bad, social scientists, including those who see themselves as feminist, have suppressed consideration of biological realities. They have tended, implicitly, to accept the notion of tabula rasa-that “blank” creature waiting to be written on by the organized forces of society-that underlies so much political theorizing in the West. As the philosopher Mary Midgley points out in her fascinating book, Beast terpretive account of human thought and action that aims for understanding and probes meaning.) The method understood as scientific, and the authors implicitly endorse it, is one that may broadly be called methodological individualism. One builds from certain rock-bottom particulars- adding them up, or relating them to one another- and the sum of these particulars is one's explanation of a given phenomenon. “Science,” says Hobbes, “is the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact upon another.” I Baer and Bositis implicitly endorse this model, despite the fact that natural sclentists long ago gave up on this understanding of causality. So-although they are absolutely correct to argue that “psychological” explanation alone will not serve, nor will social learning arguments-the particular way in which they draw biology into the picture simply affixes it to the multi-causal scene as another variable or set of variables to be concatenated with many others.