Chris Haufe – författare

Some ideas seem to possess a disproportionate ability to lead to new insights, new discoveries, new ideas, and even entirely new ways of thinking. Such ideas are said to be fruitful. Looking across the history of science and mathematics, we see creative minds preoccupied with the search for ideas of this kind. More precious than truth, but far less plentiful, fruitful ideas provide those in pursuit of knowledge with a seemingly bottomless well of innovation from which to draw as they attempt to solve new problems and to refine solutions to old ones. Seasoned researchers have a nose for these ideas. They often know in an instant that some way of approaching a problem will eventually result in a solution to it and to a whole host of other problems, all of which suddenly seem related. In Fruitfulness, Chris Haufe explains how these ideas are detected and developed into large-scale frameworks for research. He argues for a philosophical perspective on scientific knowledge that places the search for fruitfulness at the heart of the scientific enterprise. This perspective demands a fundamental shift in our thinking about scientific theories, conceiving of them as metaphors to facilitate research instead of increasingly correct descriptions of nature.

Popular science and media are awash in sweeping claims concerning how some characteristic human behavior, feeling, or psychological disposition exists because it aided our evolutionary ancestors in survival and reproduction. These claims often arise from a discipline known as Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology claims to investigate the evolutionary underpinnings of human nature, to explain why we have the thoughts, feelings, impulses that are characteristic of human experience. But when we compare these investigations with evolutionary research on other human traits, or on nonhumans, we see that Evolutionary Psychology is deeply out of touch with the basic theoretical and methodological precepts that form the basis of our knowledge of evolutionary history. By comparing research in Evolutionary Psychology with traditional forms of evolutionary research, we can appreciate the wide gap between what Evolutionary Psychology says about human nature, on the one hand, and what is traditionally required to support claims about evolutionary history, on the other.The study of evolution is not the study of the design and purpose of nature-it is the study of how populations change over time and it requires the sort of investigation for which human subjects are generally ill suited. As Chris Haufe shows, Evolutionary Psychology has constructed a parallel scientific universe - cut off from genuine scientific knowledge of the evolutionary process - which seeks to actively promote a predetermined stance on human evolutionary history regardless of whether that stance is logically consistent with current scientific fact. Illusory Riches demonstrates that our scientific knowledge of the human past and of the evolutionary process permits a far greater range of human potentialities than one might suspect from the claims of Evolutionary Psychology.

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'. Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts - whether scientific or arts-based - to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture.