The psychological foundations of culture.
@inproceedings{Tooby1992ThePF, title={The psychological foundations of culture.}, author={John Tooby and Leda Cosmides}, year={1992} }
One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiricism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience of the investigator. Many sciences develop for a time as exercises in description and empirical generalization. Only later do they acquire reasoned connections within themselves and with other branches of knowledge. Many things were scientifically known of human anatomy and the motions of the planets before they were scientifically explained.
1,868 Citations
E Evolution of Intelligence , The
- Psychology, Biology
- 2017
Although experts differ with regard to the nature of human intelligence, a more or less common ground is that it is a dimension of cognitive behavior – the way one knows the world and the wayOne uses that knowledge when adapting to changing conditions.
Selection and Attraction in Cultural Evolution
- Philosophy
- 1997
Suppose we give ourselves the goal of developing mechanistic and naturalistic causal explanations of cultural phenomena. (I don’t believe, by the way, that causal explanations are the only ones worth…
Paths Towards a Naturalistic Approach of Culture
- Education
- 2008
For a long time, social and cognitive scientists followed their own course, not really wondering what their academic neighbors were working on. The origin of this mutual indifference has been well…
Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
- Psychology, Biology
- 2015
Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences.
Practical Reasoning in a Modular Mind
- Psychology
- 2004
It is argued that distinctively human practical reasoning, too, can be understood in modular terms, and there is nothing in the human psyche that requires any significant retreat from a thesis of massively modular mental organization.
An epistemological problem for evolutionary psychology
- Psychology, Philosophy
- 2005
This article draws out an epistemological tension implicit in Cosmides and Tooby's conception of evolutionary psychology. Cosmides and Tooby think of the mind as a collection of functionally…
The Darwinian Cage
- Psychology, Biology
- 2008
This article argues that, regardless of whether that intuition is correct, evolutionary psychology fails as an explanation of human action, it fails because it loses sight of the constitutive role of norms in human conduct.
Darwinism and the Study of Human-Animal Interactions
- Psychology, Biology
- 2002
Based on the theoretical foundations laid by sociobiologists in the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary psychology has emerged as a recognized paradigm in the behavioral sciences.
The roots of scientific reasoning: Infancy, modularity and the art of tracking.
- Philosophy
- 2002
This chapter examines the extent to which there are continuities between the cognitive processes and epistemic practices engaged in by human hunter-gatherers, on the one hand, and those which are…
Adaptive Predispositions and Human Culture
- Art
- 2003
The conventional wisdom in the social sciences is that human nature is simply the imprint of an individual's background and experience. But our cultures are not random collections of arbitrary…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 289 REFERENCES
The Principles of Psychology
- EducationNature
- 1873
I.TO give readers some idea of the contents of a good book is very often the most useful thing a reviewer can do. Unfortunately that course is not open to us in the present instance. The subject is…
Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, part I: Theoretical considerations
- Psychology, Biology
- 1989
The misbehavior of organisms.
- Psychology
- 1961
THERE seems to be a continuing realization by psychologists that perhaps the white rat cannot reveal everything there is to know about behavior. Among the voices raised on this topic, Beach (1950)…
Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind."
- Psychology
- 1987
One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by…
From Tools to Theories: A Heuristic of Discovery in Cognitive Psychology.
- Psychology, Biology
- 1991
The study of scientific discovery--where do new ideas come from? has long been denigrated by philosophers as irrelevant to analyzing the growth of scientific knowledge. In particular, little is known…
GENES, MIND AND CULTURE
- Biology
- 1981
The author is joined by a philosopher, a geneticist, and a religion scholar in a discussion of “gene culture co-evolution” and of other issues raised by sociobiology.
Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science.
- Computer ScienceScience
- 1987
A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to…