Research in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Anthropology, Value Freedom, and Epistemic Objectivity.

Between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, anthropology underwent a massive paradigm shift. In "The Politics of Explanation and the Origins of Ethnography" (2000), I argued that this change occurred partly for political reasons. The questions of nineteenth century anthropology presupposed that there were "higher" and "lower" races. The change in anthropology can be partly explained by the way that the questions change when the presuppositions are rejected. This line of thought was substantially developed in Scientific Change as Political Action: Franz Boas and the Anthropology of Race (2007). There I argue that Franz Boas recognized the problematic evaluative presuppositions of evolutionary anthropology and used both methodological and empirical arguments to undermine them. The result of this critique is not value-free science; it is a science with its own value commitments.

This work in the history of anthropology is relevant to two related philosophical issues. Anthropology has constitutive political values, both in its nineteenth and twentieth century forms. One of the intended results of this research is to develop a model of the way in which epistemic objectivity might be preserved when theories are value laden. The second issue concerns race. The elimination of the concept of "race" in human biology and its preservation in the social and the health sciences raises questions about the ontological status of race as a social category. The issues are particularly pressing in the health sciences, where race is used both diagnostically and epidemiologically. I discuss this set of problems in Race and Scientific Reduction, (2007) and Can Medicine be Colorblind? (2002).

Practice Theory, Culture, and Agency.

The concept of culture once unified cultural anthropology, but during the twentieth century, it underwent a slow decomposition. (I discuss this history in "Ethnography and Culture: A Hundred Years of Co-Evolution," 2006). Some of the most powerful explanatory frameworks are arising from the intersection of anthropology and the cognitive sciences. I argued in "The Limits of Cognitivism in Anthropology" (2004) that while these approaches are promising, they have troublesome philosophical presuppositions. The problem with that essay, however, is that it leaves the problematic conceptions of "culture" and "representation" in place. In my recent thinking on these topics, I have looked to the work of Robert Brandom and Joseph Rouse. They have developed conceptions of practice that purport to underpin a pragmatic, as opposed to representational, conception of mind and language. This work intersects with so-called "dialogical" conceptions of culture in anthropology. My thought is that there is a way to give a practice-theoretic analysis of representation that will both preserve the explanatory power of cognitive anthropology and preserve what was useful in traditional, interpretive approaches. In two recent occasional papers, Evolution and the Kantian Worldview? (2006) and "Who are 'We'? Dissolving the Problem of Cultural Boundaries" (2007) I have tentatively explored this project.