https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postsc...-darwinism
EXCERPT: The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed, to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day. [...] Fodor was indifferent to recent developments in European thought [...] But he was that rare thing, a man who could lift your spirits while derogating your world view. When he died, last month, philosophy Twitter filled with variations of the same sentiment: I loved Jerry, even though he was wrong about everything.
Fodor first made his name [...] by pioneering a theory of the mind. He offered an updated version of what is sometimes called, in philosophy survey courses, rationalism. He didn’t think it was possible that we started our lives as blank slates and acquired, through experience alone, our mental repertoires; combining aspects of Chomsky’s theory of linguistic innateness with Turing’s insights into mathematical computation, he argued that there had to be a prior, unacquired “language of thought” -- the title of his career-making book -- out of which everyday cognition emerges. In offering a naturalistic account of mental representations, he staked out a middle ground where nobody thought one was possible: between our ordinary (or “folk”) notions about our own psychology -- the fact that people “account for their voluntary behavior by citing beliefs and desires they entertain” -- and the neurophysiology of the brain.
As his career progressed, Fodor became a skeptic -- but that doesn’t quite capture it. What do you get when you cross a unicorn with a gadfly? He became skeptical of his own earlier, more strictly modular thesis of the brain. [...] But nothing inspired his skepticism more than the current vogue for Charles Darwin -- specifically, the fusion of evolutionary biology, Mendelian genetics, and cognitive neuroscience known as neo-Darwinism.
“Neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,” he wrote in “What Darwin Got Wrong,” co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, and published in 2010. “It goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.”
Fodor thought that the neo-Darwinists had confused the loyalty oath of modernity -- nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos -- with blind adherence to the fallacy known as “natural selection.” That species are a product of evolutionary descent was uncontroversial to Fodor, an avowed atheist; that the mechanism guiding the process was adaptation via a competition for survival -- this, Fodor believed, had to be wrong. Fodor attacked neo-Darwinism on a purely conceptual and scientific basis -- its own turf, in other words. He thought that it suffered from a “free rider” problem: too many of our phenotypic traits have no discernible survival value, and therefore could not plausibly be interpreted as products of adaptation....
MORE: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postsc...-darwinism
EXCERPT: The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed, to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day. [...] Fodor was indifferent to recent developments in European thought [...] But he was that rare thing, a man who could lift your spirits while derogating your world view. When he died, last month, philosophy Twitter filled with variations of the same sentiment: I loved Jerry, even though he was wrong about everything.
Fodor first made his name [...] by pioneering a theory of the mind. He offered an updated version of what is sometimes called, in philosophy survey courses, rationalism. He didn’t think it was possible that we started our lives as blank slates and acquired, through experience alone, our mental repertoires; combining aspects of Chomsky’s theory of linguistic innateness with Turing’s insights into mathematical computation, he argued that there had to be a prior, unacquired “language of thought” -- the title of his career-making book -- out of which everyday cognition emerges. In offering a naturalistic account of mental representations, he staked out a middle ground where nobody thought one was possible: between our ordinary (or “folk”) notions about our own psychology -- the fact that people “account for their voluntary behavior by citing beliefs and desires they entertain” -- and the neurophysiology of the brain.
As his career progressed, Fodor became a skeptic -- but that doesn’t quite capture it. What do you get when you cross a unicorn with a gadfly? He became skeptical of his own earlier, more strictly modular thesis of the brain. [...] But nothing inspired his skepticism more than the current vogue for Charles Darwin -- specifically, the fusion of evolutionary biology, Mendelian genetics, and cognitive neuroscience known as neo-Darwinism.
“Neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,” he wrote in “What Darwin Got Wrong,” co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, and published in 2010. “It goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.”
Fodor thought that the neo-Darwinists had confused the loyalty oath of modernity -- nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos -- with blind adherence to the fallacy known as “natural selection.” That species are a product of evolutionary descent was uncontroversial to Fodor, an avowed atheist; that the mechanism guiding the process was adaptation via a competition for survival -- this, Fodor believed, had to be wrong. Fodor attacked neo-Darwinism on a purely conceptual and scientific basis -- its own turf, in other words. He thought that it suffered from a “free rider” problem: too many of our phenotypic traits have no discernible survival value, and therefore could not plausibly be interpreted as products of adaptation....
MORE: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postsc...-darwinism