The evolutionary psychology of psychology

Sciences progress when the perspective-dependence of their inquiry is taken into account and corrected for. This happened in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, but it has not yet happened in the psychological and behavioral sciences. Because human beings have no choice but to use their mind to understand the mind, the mental mechanisms brought to bear on that endevour—the evolutionary psychology of psychology—constitute psychology’s perspective-dependence. In this talk, I will show how thinking about the psychology underlying the study of the mind explains (1) the problem of free will and (2) broad assumption(s) about mental processes that are perennially re-discovered and then later shown to be insufficient. Accounting for the structure of our evolved cognitive mechanisms is a necessary meta-scientific endeavour that clears away mysteries and highlights problems that need to be solved, allowing us to side-step prejudices of the mind.