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A mechanistic framework for Darwinism or why Fodor’s objection fails

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Abstract

Fodor (Mind Lang 23:1–24, Mind Lang 2008a, 23:50–57, 2008b and Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (What Darwin go wrong, Picador, New York, 2011) argue that Darwinism cannot be true on the grounds that there are no laws of selection to support counterfactuals about why traits are selected-for. Darwinian explanations, according to this objection, amount to mere ‘plausible historical narratives’. I argue that the objection is predicated on two problematic assumptions: A nomic-subsumption account of causation and causal explanation, and a fine-grained view of the individuation of selected-for effects. Against the former, I argue that Darwinian explanations are a historical species of mechanistic explanation and that mechanisms are causally productive and counterfactual supporting in the absence of appropriate laws. Once this mechanistic framework is in place, the demand for laws of selection vanishes and the historical cum causal coherence of Darwinism is restored. As for the second assumption, I argue that it is an artefact of the teleosemantic program with no basis in evolutionary biology and that properly understood, Darwinian evolutionary biology shows just why teleosemantics cannot succeed.

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Notes

  1. For responses to these criticisms see Fodor (2008b) and Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2011, pp. 179–189).

  2. What is controversial is the claim that only laws support counterfactuals.

  3. The view that biological regularities are not laws because they are historically contingent is well known in the philosophy of biology as the Evolutionary Contingency Thesis (Beatty 1995).

  4. This problem is familiar from Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) famous critique of the adaptationist program. But while they focused on the methodological problem of testing adaptationist hypotheses in the face of alternative adaptationist and non-adaptationist hypotheses, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2011, p. 109) claim to go ‘deeper’ by focusing on the metaphysical problem of specifying the facts or ground that make adaptationist hypotheses true (Sober 2008, p. 43).

  5. Like the current ‘statistical interpretation’ of evolutionary theory (Matthen and Ariew 2002, 2009; Walsh et al. 2002; Walsh 2007), Fodor and Piattelli- Palmarini (2011, pp. 136, 174, 182, 187–189) argue that mathematical models of population dynamics cite statistical correlations, not causal mechanisms. However, unlike these authors, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini don’t emphasize the difference between Darwin’s theory and the Modern-Synthesis neo-Darwinian version.

  6. Fodor (1990, p. 93) summarizes this framework: ‘...I assume that if the generalization that \(X\)s cause \(Y\)s is counterfactual supporting, the there is a “covering” law that relates the property of being \(X\) to the property of being a cause of \(Y\)s: counterfactual supporting causal generalizations are (either identical to or) backed by causal laws, and laws are relations among properties.’

  7. The suggestion that Fodor’s objection loses its force once Darwinism is presented in terms of this alternative framework has been made by Godfrey-Smith (2008, p. 35). But it has not been fully developed.

  8. I should say that this way of putting things is not the way that Machamer, Darden and Craver (2000, pp. 4–8) favor. In fact, they explicitly reject reducing activities to changes in the (modal) properties of entities and hence hypostatize activities over and above properties. Yet, Craver (2001, p. 58 footnote 4) is happy to allow these modal notions as ‘a substantivalist way of expressing the fact that there are certain properties of entities which allow them to engage in activities’. For the purposes of this paper, however, we need not dwell into the correct metaphysics of mechanisms. The point is that the causal powers and explanatory force of mechanisms do not depend on laws of nature.

  9. Godfrey-Smith (2008, p. 35) points out that the mechanistic view tends to take singular causation as primary but he doesn’t provide an argument to that effect. He also claims that laws are not the only basis for counterfactuals (2008, p. 39) but he does not give an alternative basis. Dennett (2008, p. 27) briefly mentions Fodor’s commitment to the covering-law account of causal explanation but says nothing about the metaphysics of causation. Sober (2010, p. 606) explicitly remains neutral about whether singular causation depends on laws or not. And Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2011, p. 186) simply deny this possibility in passing.

  10. Havstad (2011) points out that the extreme variability among specific instances of natural selection constitutes a permanent problem for any mechanistic account of natural selection. This is not however a problem for a mechanistic account of selection-for explanations.

  11. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

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Acknowledgments

I will like to thank audiences in Toronto, Mérida, San Francisco, and Montreal. I am especially indebted to Denis Walsh for his support and encouragement and for taking the time to read and make extremely valuable comments on many drafts of this paper.

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  1. Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto, 88 Spadina Road, Apt 502, Toronto, ON, M5R 2S8, Canada

    Fermín Fulda

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Fulda, F. A mechanistic framework for Darwinism or why Fodor’s objection fails. Synthese 192, 163–183 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0557-4

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