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Notes
I will use “equidynamic” more generally to refer to arguments of the type that such reasoning would embody.
Concepts of innateness are often problematic (Griffiths 2009), and Strevens’ sense of “innate” isn’t specified in detail, although he distinguishes the claim that equidynamic reasoning is innate from the claim that equidynamic reasoning is universal among humans (207). Drawing on a concept of environmentally relativized innateness from O’Neill (2014), I would characterize Strevens’ view as that equidynamic reasoning capabilities are innate in the sense that they almost always develop in those conditions in which humans almost always find themselves.
Note that although equidynamic reasoning processes would be heuristic, in that they start from simplifying assumptions and are not guaranteed to produce correct conclusions, Strevens’ proposal does not constitute a contribution to the bounded rationality research program, since his heuristics seem complex and difficult rather than “fast and frugal” (e.g., Gigerenzer and Selten 2001).
In what follows, I will make no distinction between unconscious processes of inference, and other computational processes whose inputs could be described by premises of an inference, and whose outputs could be described by its conclusion, but which do not make use of propositional representations (see e.g., Haugeland 1997).
Note that many evolutionary biologists hold that such adaptationist hypotheses—that such and such organisms have trait T because having T seems adaptive—typically need significant further justification (cf. Gould and Lewontin 1979).
Among other things, I should not have had to work as hard as I have to convince other philosophers of biology that outcomes in biological environments exhibit sensitive dependence on particularities of environmental conditions, if this point were obvious to most people, as Strevens suggests (136).
Strevens argues that Darwinian theory was from its origin based on underlying equidynamic reasoning, motivating this view with several instances in which Darwin uses words such as “chance.” Much of Darwin’s language has a deterministic flavor, however. Detailed historical scholarship would be needed to establish the claim that Darwin’s thinking about evolution was not merely intermittently or vaguely probabilistic, given that it was not particularly mathematical (Ariew 2007).
The word “unsystematic” is intended to rule out, for example, cases in which an infant can see that an experimenter intentionally behaved as if seeking balls of a specific color. “Jumbled” is intended to be vague, as befits a rule based on flexible pattern matching.
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Abrams, M., Eberhardt, F. & Strevens, M. Equidynamics and reliable reasoning about frequencies. Metascience 24, 173–188 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9971-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9971-y