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Jerry Fodor’s Enduring Critique of Neo-Darwinism

#1
C C Offline
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
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#2
Yazata Offline
(Dec 14, 2017 03:01 AM)C C Wrote: 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...

That's pretty arrogant, of course it comes from the New Yorker so it isn't surprising. I remember reading Fodor's Language of Thought in Kent Bach's philosophy of language seminar.

I'm sorry to hear of Fodor's recent death.

Quote:Fodor first made his name [...] by pioneering a theory of the mind...

I've drifted away from the philosophy of mind since those days and am not particularly interested in it any longer. But I do remember thinking that what Fodor wrote made sense at the time.

Quote:As his career progressed, Fodor became a skeptic... 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 one of those words that sounds good but doesn't mean much of anything. I guess that it basically means contemporary evolutionary theory, as compared to Darwin's original ideas. Darwin was a bit of a Lamarckian and he didn't know anything about genetics, genes, DNA or genomics. Splice all that stuff onto natural selection and you get a new synthesis. (I don't think that cognitive neuroscience plays much of a role in it.)

It's a bit odd how several prominent philosophers of mind have come out as opponents of biological evolution by natural selection. Thomas Nagel ('What it's like to be a bat') is another even more outspoken one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos
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