The classic work by behaviorist B.F. Skinner offers his analysis of how a "technology of behavior" can condition human responses to the environment.

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Karl Raimund Poppers (1902-1994) Hauptwerk, die Logik der Forschung (1934), gilt als Grundlagenwerk des kritischen Rationalismus. Der kritische Rationalismus zeigt, warum unser Wissen fehlbar ist und versteht den Erkenntnisfortschritt als Resultat von Hypothesenbildung und -widerlegung. Der Sammelband orientiert sich an der Gliederung der Logik der Forschung. Seine Beiträge kommentieren die jeweiligen Themen nach aktueller Forschungslage.

(1) For much of this century, moral philosophy has been constrained by the supposed absolute gap between is andought, and the consequent belief that the facts of life cannot of themselves yield an ethical blueprint for future action. For this reason, ethics has sustained an eerie existence largely apart from science. Its most respected interpreters still believe that reasoning about right and wrong can be successful without a knowledge of the brain, the human organ where all the decisions about right (...) and wrong are made. Ethical premises are typically treated in the manner of mathematical propositions: directives supposedly independent of human evolution, with a claim to ideal, eternal truth. (shrink)

(1) For much of this century, moral philosophy has been constrained by the supposed absolute gap between is andought, and the consequent belief that the facts of life cannot of themselves yield an ethical blueprint for future action. For this reason, ethics has sustained an eerie existence largely apart from science. Its most respected interpreters still believe that reasoning about right and wrong can be successful without a knowledge of the brain, the human organ where all the decisions about right (...) and wrong are made. Ethical premises are typically treated in the manner of mathematical propositions: directives supposedly independent of human evolution, with a claim to ideal, eternal truth. (shrink)

The relationship between biology, the science of organisms, and ethics, the philosophy of morality, has never been a particularly happy or fruitful one. Indeed, for much of this century, attempts to relate our animal nature to our sense of right and wrong have been taken as paradigms of how not to do moral philosophy. It has been argued that such systems of “evolutionary ethics” commit the most basic fallacies, and can serve only as dreadful warnings to those who would cross (...) interdisciplinary divides. (shrink)

Let us by-pass a lot of disputation by starting with the objections to the dispute itself. It is surely a misfortune, not a gain, both to the biological and the social sciences that a discontinuity has appeared between them over the topic of Human Nature—that the findings of each group seem in important ways alien and unusable for the purposes of the other. To be forced to give up hope of learning anything from a particular source is always a misfortune, (...) it cannot be a cause for triumph. The unity of the world we study calls for free trade in information and in concepts between all the sciences. Autonomy cannot be isolation. Of course each discipline needs to be distinct and to use its own methods. But each also vitally needs to be open to suggestions from its neighbours. Barriers ought not to be raised except against real dangers. In the case before us, I want to say that the suspicions of the social sciences, from which this particular gap largely arises, are misplaced. The contraband article which they fear is real enough, but it is no real part of the physical sciences. It is irrelevant melodrama. What actually is part of the physical sciences cannot be contraband; it is truth which has somehow to be studied and accepted. The workings of prejudice on both sides make this hard, causing contraband sometimes to be exported as fact, and fact sometimes to be rejected as contraband. In this paper I suggest that we concentrate on understanding these prejudices—not because psychoanalysing our errors is any substitute for seeking truth, but because in an ingrained dispute like this it may be the only way to start doing so. (shrink)