Are there Psychological Species?

Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):293-315 (2015)
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Abstract

A common reaction to functional diversity is to group entities into clusters that are functionally similar. I argue here that people are diverse with respect to reasoning-related processes, and that these processes satisfy the basic requirements for evolving entities: they are heritable, mutable, and subject to selective pressures. I propose a metric to quantify functional difference and show how this can be used to place psychological processes into a structure akin to a phylogenetic or evolutionary tree. Three species concepts are repurposed from biology and used to understand relationships in that tree

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Joshua Fost
Princeton University (PhD)

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