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The Sociobiological View of Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Roger Trigg
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Extract

What is the relation of the biological to the social sciences? Fierce battles are being currently fought over this question and much hangs on the answer. If society (or culture) is taken as an irreducible category which can only be understood in its own terms, the social sciences can feel safe from the sinister designs of other disciplines. Yet it is a commonplace that cultures vary, and we humans are prone to look at the differences rather than the similarities between them. The result can be a thoroughgoing relativism. If culture cannot be understood by means of any non-cultural categories, cultural differences themselves can be accepted as the ultimate truth about man. When everything is cultural, even the notion of a non-cultural category can seem to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms. The categories with which we think are the product of our culture, or so we are told. Instead of our being able to understand culture in terms of anything beyond itself, our understanding appears totally moulded by the society to which we belong. Any theory can thus be seen as merely the expression of the beliefs of a particular society.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 17: Objectivity and Cultural Divergence , March 1984 , pp. 93 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1984

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References

1 Wilson, E. O., Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 4.Google Scholar

2 See my book, The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of Sociobiology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).Google Scholar

3 Op. cit. 547.

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5 Wilson, E. O., On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 208.Google ScholarPubMed

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7 Op. cit. 79.

8 See Dawkins, R., The Extended Phenotype: the Gene as the Unit of Selection (Oxford: Freeman, 1982).Google Scholar

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