In Defense of Instinct Concepts

In the twentieth century, the distinction between instinct and learning motivated international debates that reshaped the disciplinary landscape of animal behavior studies. When the dust settled, a new consensus emerged: the development of behavioral traits involves complex interactions between organisms, genetic inheritance, and experience with the environment. This insight has spurred some philosophers and scientists to eschew instinct versus learning dichotomies—and instinct concepts in particular—on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I reassess influential twentieth-century arguments against instinct concepts and instinct versus learning dichotomies to show that these arguments have limited scope. Then, I use historical case studies to demonstrate the combinatorial flexibility of instinct and learning concepts. Although instinct and learning are often framed as mutually exclusive opposites, scientists continue to combine them in causal physiological accounts of behavior. I conclude by suggesting that instinct concepts help scientists achieve their epistemic aims because of the way they facilitate abductive inferences.