"Post Darwinian Societies Seminar" #13

Philippe Van Parijs (UCLouvain).

Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences

In my Oxford DPhil thesis, which became my first book (Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences. An emerging paradigm, Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), I wanted to explore the space of social-scientific explanations that did not rely on mechanism consisting of the aggregation of individual choices. This led me to focus on social-scientific evolutionary explanations that relied either (marginally) on natural selection or (mainly) on reinforcement as the underlying mechanism. Diachronic linguistics and historical materialism were used as the two main illustrations of the second case. The presentation will give a succinct account of the claims I made in this old book.