JOURNAL ARTICLES

& Book Chapters

 

Science-Humanities Integration

I have long felt that the humanities has been paralyzed over the past few decades by extreme forms of social constructivism or “postmodernism,” to use a term that no one likes but that I think is quite descriptive and accurately picks out a theoretical stance that is not only very much alive, but still the default position in the fields in which I was trained (religious studies and Asian studies), as well as many other core humanities fields (literature, art history, cultural anthropology, etc.).

My 2008 monograph on “what science offers the humanities” made the case to my fellow humanists for why we need to move beyond postmodernism and embrace “vertical integration” or “consilience” with the natural science; making this theoretical argument, in various forms, has been my central focus for the past few years. Though I am still very much involved in defending and advancing the cause of science-humanities integration at a meta-theoretical level, I have in recent years turned more toward applications or “proof of concept”—actual applications of cognitive science or evolutionary theory to my areas of study, such as my 2019 monograph, Mind and Body in Early China.

Since 2008, I have also begun to focus more on the other direction: what humanistic expertise has to offer to working scientists. With Mark Collard, I argued for a “second wave” of consilience that would get beyond overly narrow emphasis on either nature or nurture and emphasize the bidirectional nature of science-humanities cooperation. Our edited volume, Creating Consilience (2012), offers a variety of case examples of what this second wave might look like. More recently, colleagues and I published a piece on “Psychology as a Historical Science” to make the case to psychologists that a deeper engagement with historians and other humanities scholars would result in better science.

Asterisks indicate refereed publications; sole-authored unless otherwise indicated.

Featured

Muthukrishna, Michael, Joseph Henrich and Edward Slingerland. “Psychology as a Historical Science,” (PDF) Annual Review of Psychology 72 (January 2021, published on-line October 2020). *

Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. We review examples of research that may be classified as historical psychology, introduce sources of historical data and methods for analyzing them, explain the critical role of theory, and discuss how psychologists can add historical depth and nuance to their work.

“Introduction: Cognitive Science and Chinese Philosophy,” in Huang, Kevin and Edward Slingerland (editors), Guoji Hanxue luncong 國際漢學論叢 Special Issue on Chinese Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology in Hong Kong, in press.

“Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion” , (PDF) Journal for Cognitive Historiography 1.1: 121-130 (2013). *

“Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures,” (PDF) in Creating Consilience, Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, 74-87. New York: Oxford University Press (2012). *

Slingerland, Edward and Mark Collard. “Creating Consilience: Toward a Second Wave,” (PDF) in Creating Consilience, Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, 3-40. New York: Oxford University Press (2012). *

“Consilience and the Status of Human Level Truth,” in A Vision of Transdisciplinarity; Laying Foundations for a World Knowledge Dialogue, ed. Frédéric Darbellay, Moira Cockell, Jérôme Billotte and Francis Waldvogel, 51-60. Lausanne, Switzerland: EPFL Press, 2008.

“Good and Bad Reductionism: Acknowledging the Power of Culture,” (PDF) invited response to Joseph Carroll target article, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study”, Style 42.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2008): 266-271.