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18 Oct 09

Fun and Games in Fantasyland

Daniel Dennett commentary on Fodor, “Against Darwinism” January 29, 2007

ase.tufts.edu/...fodorondarwinism3b.pdf - Preview

Fodor Dennett darwinism evolution natural-selection adaptationism

22 Jul 09

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution (discussion)

I would like to invite discussion on my paper, On Fodor on Darwin On Evolution, which is a critique of Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lectures at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Fodor, forthcoming; Fodor&Piatelli-Palmarini). Reponses follow.

philpapers.org/...thread.pl - Preview

Darwin Fodor evolution natural-selection

16 Jul 09

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 21

Blackburn and other react to Fofor's Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

www.lrb.co.uk/...letters.html - Preview

Fodor evolution Darwin adaptationism

here is the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober’s solution to the problem, which he gave in 1984, and which is basically the same as Fodor’s own implicit proposal: ‘“Selection of” pertains to the effects of a selection process, whereas “selection for” describes its causes. To say there is selection for a given property means that having the property causes success in survival and reproduction.’ If a property doesn’t cause success in survival and reproduction, but is linked to one that does, then there is no selection for that property.

Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings

LRB · Jerry Fodor:

www.lrb.co.uk/...fodo01_.html - Preview

evolution fodor philosophy genetics biology

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 22

Coyne and Kitcher react to Fodor's Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

www.lrb.co.uk/...letters.html - Preview

Fodor adaptationism evolution Darwin

Whiteness and camouflage (along with protein balances and forms of genetic material) are candidates ‘for’ natural selection because they figure in the causal history of the changes in the bears; being a Thursday’s cub isn’t a candidate because it doesn’t play a comparable causal role.
The rival mechanisms Fodor cites are supplements to natural selection, not replacements.
7 more annotations...
- The constraints of development may tell us why an eye, for example, has a particular form (our retina lies behind the blood vessels and nerves that feed it because retinas evolved from everted portions of the brain), but they cannot tell us why eyes are there in the first place. They are there because the gradual acquisition of vision gave animals a leg up in the evolutionary struggle for existence.
- many features of organisms can be by-products of evolution rather than the direct objects of natural selection.
- evo-devo drives home the importance of the fact that in addition to the information in the genes (the ‘recipes’ for making offspring), there is information in the developmental processes (the ‘readers’ of the recipes), and both together need to be considered in a good explanation of the resulting phenotypes, since the interactions between them can be surprising.
- Fodor’s mistake, which he is hardly alone in making, is to suppose that if our minds are scientifically explicable bio-mechanisms, then there could not be any room at all for values.
- Jerry Fodor’s attack on ultra-Darwinian pan-adaptationism (and Flintstone evolutionary psychology) is spot on, but he does less than justice to Darwin, or to modern pluralistic evolutionary theory.
- organisms select environments just as environments select organisms.
- Modern selection theory (in the hands of other than ultra-Darwinists) recognises multiple levels at which selection works: gene, genome, organism (phenotype), population and species. It also recognises that what evolves is not an adult phenotype but an entire developmental system (faster-running antelopes do not emerge fully grown). By contrast with pan-adaptationism, pluralistic evolutionary theory recognises the presence of spandrels (non-adaptive features of a phenotype, such as the red colour of blood) and exaptations: features originally selected with one function which then come to have another, such as feathers, which were a thermo-regulatory mechanism before they took on their role in flying birds.

20 Apr 09

Fodor Against Darwinism

This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print efore. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what happens when you try to integrate Darwinism with an intentional theory like propositional attitude psychology.

ruccs.rutgers.edu/...Fodor_Against_Darwinism.pdf - Preview

Fodor evolution grue selection

19 Feb 09

Fodor on the extended mind

Jerry Fodor has a lively and thoughtful review of Andy Clark's new book Supersizing the Mind in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. The paper is in effect a critique of the extended mind thesis, targeting Andy's and my joint paper "The Extended Mind", Andy's book, and my foreword to the book. Fodor makes two or three interesting objections to the extended mind thesis. (fragments of consciousness)

fragments.consc.net/...odor-on-the-extended-mind.html - Preview

fodor extended-mind Chalmers cogsci

06 Feb 09

Where is my mind?

There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You’ll regret it if you don’t. (Jerry Fodor review of Clark)

www.lrb.co.uk/...fodo01_.html - Preview

mind extended-mind clark fodor cogsci

Is what my robot does when it ‘decides’ to change course a sort of thing which if it had happened inside the robot, ‘I would have had no hesitation in accepting as part of [a] cognitive process?’
But how am I to understand the hypothesis that it would (or wouldn’t) have changed course if it had collided with the couch in my head?
5 more annotations...
- His real argument is that, barring a principled reason for distinguishing between what Otto keeps in his notebook and what Inga keeps in her head, there’s a slippery slope from the one to the other.
- The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things.
- What I should have said isn’t that only what’s literally and unmetaphorically mental has content, but that if something literally and unmetaphorically has content, then either it is mental (part of a mind) or the content is ‘derived’ from something that is mental. ‘Underived’ content (to borrow John Searle’s term) is the mark of the mental; underived content is what minds and only minds have.
- Externalism needs internalism; but not vice versa. External representation is a side-show; internal representation is ineliminably the main event.
- your internal model of the world contains stuff that the world itself does not; this happens not just when your beliefs are false but also when they are hypothetical (‘if there are clouds, there will be rain’ can be true even if there aren’t any clouds); or when they are modal (‘it might rain’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain); or when they are in the past or future tense (‘it used to rain here a lot’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain here anymore).

09 May 08

Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism W/out Nat Selection

"Fodor’s co-author, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, the distinguished professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona --who's handling the biology for the book -- is intrigued by origin of form and recently agreed to pick up where Fodor left off." (Scoop)

www.scoop.co.nz/...S00106.htm - Preview

fodor evolution grue

06 Apr 08

Fodor: Why would mother nature bother?

Fodor reviews Dennett's Freedom Evolves in LRB

www.churchofvirus.org/...Printpage.php - Preview

Freewill Fodor Dennett philosophy

Dennett's way of getting agents into a deterministic world depends on selling you an instrumentalist account of agency. Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that theories and explanations are (just) devices for making predictions; their predictions are the only claim they make to correspondence with the world. Accordingly, their predictions exhaust their content. I think Dennett's (usually tacit) instrumentalism is close to the heart of his philosophy. It is ubiquitous in the present book, and it takes a variety of forms.
Agency doesn't, therefore, require creatures that actually act out of their preferences. It doesn't even require creatures that actually have preferences. All it requires is creatures that behave as though they had and whose behaviour is therefore interpretable 'from the intentional stance'