Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

How Jerry Fodor slid down the slippery slope to Anti-Darwinism, and how we can avoid the same fate

  • Original paper in Philosophy of Biology
  • Published:
European Journal for Philosophy of Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

There is only one physically possible process that builds and operates purposive systems in nature: natural selection. What it does is build and operate systems that look to us purposive, goal directed, teleological. There really are not any purposes in nature and no purposive processes ether. It is just one vast network of linked causal chains. Darwinian natural selection is the only process that could produce the appearance of purpose. That is why natural selection must have built and must continually shape the intentional causes of purposive behavior. Fodor’s argument against Darwinian theory involves a biologist’s modus tollens which is a cognitive scientist’s modus ponens. Assuming his argument is valid, the right conclusion is not that Darwin’s theory is mistaken but that Fodor’s and any other non-Darwinian approaches to the mind are wrong. It shows how getting things wrong in the philosophy of biology leads to mistaken conclusions with the potential to damage the acceptance of a theory with harmful consequences for human well-being. Fodor has shown that the real consequence of rejecting a Darwinian approach to the mind is to reject a Darwinian theory of phylogenetic evolution. This forces us to take seriously a notion that otherwise would not have much of a chance: that when it comes to the nature of mental states, indeterminacy rules. This is an insight that should have the most beneficial impact on freeing cognitive neuroscience from demands on the adequacy of its theories that it could never meet.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. What Darwin Got Wrong, J. Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

  2. MIT Press, 1990, particularly “Theory of Content, I.” These arguments were prefigured in Rosenberg (1986a, b), I had deployed the same argument Jerry used in Theory of Content to advance a conclusion similar to the one I will advance here.

  3. “Against Darwinism”, http://www.google.com/search?q=jerry+fodor+against+darwinism&ie=utf-8=oe=utf-8&aq=;t&rls=;org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=;firefox-a, January 18, 2007

  4. Of course, this is only the basic problem: the next problem is how the clump of matter can be about properties, or even harder, be about propositions—false as well as true, abstract objects such as universals and numbers, and fictional, imaginary, or impossible objects. But solving the basic problem is a sufficiently imposing challenge.

  5. Dennett (1987). For these purposes the frog turns out to be a bad example, since it’s close to impervious to operant conditioning, But science shouldn’t stand in the way of philosophy

  6. It’s not as though this problem of indeterminacy escaped the notice of teleosemanticists. Dennett already noticed it in Content and Consciousness, though his preferred animal companion was a dog. He detected the indeterminacy problem but he didn’t solve it.

  7. Critique of Judgment, section 75.

  8. Notice that if we interpret ‘selection-for’ in this counterfactual as ‘weak selection for’, which is the right interpretation, it turns out true, not false. So there is no difference between these counterfactuals that requires explanation in terms of laws. That’s why little remains of Jerry’s argument once we recognize that the theory makes claims only about selection-against.

  9. In any case, we’ll see below that these are not the counterfactuals Darwin needs to get straight.

  10. Synthese, 1979, v 28, pp. 97–115

  11. See for example, “Against Darwinism,” p. 10, where Fodor invokes “the effects of unsystematic, interacting variables” to obscure the power of ceteris paribus laws to support counterfactuals. The trouble is no special scientist is in the business of enumerating these variables, nor can they owing to their large number, their heterogeneity, and the vagueness of their descriptions. The Gresham’s law example in the text shows the problems with this claim.

  12. I deal with the Philips Curve in example in Rosenberg (2012).

  13. Gould and Lewontin (1979).

  14. The lack of laws in biology is in fact heavily over-determined. One reason is that all species are spatiotemporally distributed individuals, so that all biological kinds are implicitly spatiotemporal restricted predicates, owing to their conceptual connections with particular species, families, genera, that have occurred on this planet. But there are other less tendentious arguments for this conclusion. In The Advancement of Science (1993) Kitcher offers one such argument. The argument given above is the one most relevant to the present discussion.

  15. Beatty (1995). Beatty first articulated this thesis as far back as Beatty (1983).

  16. At this point, Jerry may interject, with exasperation, that’s my point: “Adaptational explanations are a species of historical narratives. If so, then everything can be saved from the wreckage [of evolutionary biology] except the notion of selection for, since historical narratives don’t support counterfactuals, it’s likely that selecting for can’t be salvaged.” “Against Darwinism”, p. 20 Aside from the fact that Darwinism doesn’t need selection for, and Fodor’s arguments don’t apply to selection-against, he doesn’t seem to recognize that he has stumbled over the fact that all explanations in what he called the “special sciences”—including cognitive science—turn out to be historical explanations, if adaptational ones are. Why this is so will be obvious by the end of this paper.

  17. Hardy-Weinberg law: In a large, randomly mating population, and in the absence of mutation, immigration, emigration, and natural selection, gene frequencies and the distribution of genotypes remain constant from generation to generation. Fisher’s sex ratio model, roughly stated: If males are less frequent than female, males have higher fitness, and females genetically disposed to bearing males will have more grand off-spring, increasing the frequency of genetic disposition to have more male off-spring and increasing the number of males until the proportion of males exceeds 50 %. The process will then operate in the reverse direction, maintaining the sex ratio around a stable 1:1 equilibrium.

  18. That’s what Beatty did in the “The environmental contingency thesis.”

  19. Except for the bizarre possibility of Boltzmann Brains, a cosmological hypothesis that gives the philosophers use of science fiction carte blanche.

  20. Of course, the fact that the 2d law is the odd man out when it comes to symmetry has suggested to many philosophers of physics that it is no law after all, despite the fact that it supports counterfactuals with the best of them. Don’t mention this to Jerry.

  21. This is Sober’s approach in The Philosophy of Biology (1993). It makes a problem for philosophers like Matthen, Lewens, Walsh and Ariew who invoke the necessary truth in explanations of contingent facts. See Matthen and Ariew (2002), and Walsh et al. (2002).

  22. This approach originates with John and Mills (1979), and has been endorsed by Brandon, Sober, and many others. But see Beatty and Finsen (nee Mills) (1989), for revisionist doubts. Elliott Sober’s own doubts about the propensity definition are expressed in “The Two Faces of Fitness” (2000).

  23. “Fitness,” Journal of Philosophy, 1983

  24. Adams and Aizawa (1994a, b)

References

  • Adams, F., & Aizawa, K. (1994a). Fodorian semantics. In S. Stich & T. Warfield (Eds.), Mental representations (pp. 223–242). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Adams, F., & Aizawa, K. (1994b). ‘X’ means X: Fodor/Warfield semantics. Minds and Machines, 4, 215–231.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J. (1983). The insights and oversights of molecular genetics: The place of the evolutionary perspective. In P. D. Asquith & T. Nickles (Eds.), PSA 1982, (Vol. 1). East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J. (1995). The evolutionary contingency thesis. In G. Wolters & J. G. Lennox (Eds.), Concepts, theories, and rationality in the biological sciences. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J., & Finsen, S. (1989). Rethinking the propensity interpretation. In M. Ruse (Ed.), What philosophy of biology is. Boston: Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beatty, J., & Mills, S. (1979). The propensity interpretation of fitness. Philosophy of Science, 46, 263–286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, D. (1987). Why the law of effect won’t go away. In Brainstorms. Cambridge: MIT Press.

  • Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205(1161), 581–598.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kitcher, P. (1993). The advancement of science. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Matthen, M., & Ariew, A. (2002). Two ways of thinking about fitness and natural selection. Journal of Philosophy, 99, 55–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosenberg, A. (1986a). Intentional psychology and evolutionary biology, part I: the uneasy analogy. Behaviorism, 14, 15–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosenberg, A. (1986b). Intentional psychology and evolutionary biology: part II: crucial disanalogy. Behaviorism, 14, 125–138.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosenberg, A. (2012). Why do spatiotemporally restricted regularities explain in the social sciences? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63(1), 1–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sober, E. (1993). The philosophy of biology. Boulder: Westview.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sober, E. (2000). The two faces of fitness. In R. Singh, D. Paul, C. Krimbas, & J. Beatty (Eds.), Thinking about evolution: Historical, philosophical, and political perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walsh, D. M., Ariew, A., & Lewens, T. (2002). The trials of life: natural selection and random drift. Philosophy of Science, 69(3), 452–473.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Center for Philosophy of Biology, 201 West Duke Building Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Alex Rosenberg

Authors
  1. Alex Rosenberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alex Rosenberg.

Additional information

Thanks to Elliot Sober, Robert Brandon, Mohan Matthen, Karen Neander, Alan Love, Fred Dretske and two referees of this journal for comments on a previous draft.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Rosenberg, A. How Jerry Fodor slid down the slippery slope to Anti-Darwinism, and how we can avoid the same fate. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 3, 1–17 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0055-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-012-0055-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation