Dupre, John

Dupre, John. 1993. The Disorder of Things Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. 

Darden, Lindley, and Nancy Matdl. 1977. Interfield theories. Philosophy of Science 44 43-64. Dupre, John. 1993. The disorder of things. Metaphysical foundations cf the disunity of science. 

Dupre, John. Sex, Gender, and Essence, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XI (1986), 441 57. 

John Dupre. It doesn t sound that anything you said goes strongly against the hypotheses that they are all right... 

John Dupre. You add them all together, and there is not so much of a problem. 

John Dupr. I guess the idea of upward causation is what I think philosophers have tended to think of as the classic form of reductionism, that you d. .. 

John Dupre Or you d explain human behaviour in terms of the interactions of brain cells. The opposite, downward causation, would be, for example, to say that the behaviour of a person causes their brain cells to move in a certain way. Lisa s example today, I take to be, as she just summarised it, precisely a claim to downward causation. That is to say that the social phenomena actually act causally on the individual, and, of course, to deny what is a very common thesis in the philosophy of social phenomena, which is methodological individualism, which says, and many people, social scientists and philosophers have said - you have to be able to explain social phenomena by looking at the behaviour of individuals. And that s the reductionist view as opposed to the downward causation view, which is an anti-reductionist view. And I think that s certainly one of the standard ways philosophers have understood the debate. 

John Dupr. The metaphysics was not the focus of your talk. 

John Dupr. Well, there s a very small part of the paper at the beginning that you did read. And right at the beginning you made a statement that is clearly false, and I m sure you know is false, and it seems to me. .. 

John Dupre Wait. But you are grabbing the term physicalism for something that implies reductionism in principle or something like that. I don t think that s by any means a consensus,... 

John Dupre I guess what I want to point to is not to deny that there is any evolutionary basis for maternal attachment. The question that I put to you after your talk - what do we learn more than the fairly banal empirical observation that people have certainly made before anybody had ever heard of natural selection, that mothers are generally attached to their children This is an empirical fact. It s one certainly that is entirely consistent with and indeed even implied by the theory of evolution by natural selection. So what do we learn, what have we learned, other than that evolutionary. .. ... 

John Dupre But look. The principles of fall have enabled us to put spaceships on the moon. The suggestion that mothers often take care of their children and that maybe that this has some connection with Darwinism adds absolutely nothing to what we knew already, it seems to me. And what have we discovered, what we maybe can say we now know, is that most... 

John Dupre I m sorry. We know that... what... 

John Dupre I imagine that that s probably so. 

John Dupr. I understand that there s good evidence for that, yes. 

John Dupre I don t quite know where the interesting but fairly robust came from. I ve conceded throughout this talk a couple of points, that there are causal determinants of people s brains that included genetic determinants. What I m denying is the evidence for any interesting robust genetic determinants that are relevant to the kinds of behaviours that they re (frequently) talking about. 

John Dupre Because I don t think that there are methodological sins in those cases. You take sickle-cell anemia. The whole causal story is largely known. If somebody came up and gave me a set of genes, and a set of developmental pathways that led to a module that could be shown to fire and produce a kind of chasing behaviour when confronted with this rape-victim, then. .. 

John Dupre Start with the first question. I m certainly sorry if this is offensive to people. I guess my only defence is that being as it is currently a very widespread discussed claim by evolutionary psychologists. But perhaps one should let that be and not sink to the level that one s opponents may have fallen. And as I said, I m certainly sorry if I ve offended people. I don t really understand the second part of your question. I am reluctant to say there is no normal behaviour because I think there is a kind of bedrock of, for example, the example earlier of the mothers taking care of their... 

John Dupre. I take that as just a remark in support of what I m saying —... 

John Dupre Perhaps he should be aware of what he is doing in a broader context. 

John Dupre. And conceivably not desirable. There is a school of thought at least in philosophy, that the fact that words have a certain kind of looseness may actually be advantageous in developing thought. 

John Dupre SEAS-Queen Building, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK... 

One philosopher who has appreciated the problems with this view for biological kinds is John Dupre (1993). 

Henri Dupre, Letter to the Editor, Aviation Week and Space Technology 95 (April 5,1971) 50 John L. Pedrick Jr., Letter to the Editor National Priorities, Aviation Week and Space Technology 95 (April 12, 1971) 60. 

D. B. DuPr, in Kirk-Othmer, Chemical Encyclopedia, Vol. 14, p. 395, John Wiley Sons, New York (1981). 

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