What, you expected updates?
July 5, 2008 – 10:55 pmI’m likely not going to update this until September.
Philosopher Fight
April 13, 2008 – 1:41 pmI am writing a paper which is talking about an article that a philosopher named Jerry Fodor had written. In brief, he doesn’t think natural selection can explain phenotypic variation in the world. That is, it doesn’t explain hands and polar bear colors and so on. There’s actually almost a whole issue of Mind & Language dedicated to this, and you can get all the papers for free here.
Anyways, that’s the boring stuff. Take a look at what philosopher Daniel Dennett has to say in a response to Fodor’s paper. (The title of the response is “Fun and Games in Fantasyland”.)
As I said at the outset, Fodor’s paper is a gold mine of Cautionary Tales with which to scare the very dickens out of the young. Look what happens, boys and girls, when you try to shoehorn all your arguments into the form of constructive dilemmas, as if you were doing proofs in geometry or number theory, where hard edges abound. Look what happens, boys and girls, when you can’t be bothered to look at the actual science and instead make up all your examples. You can have a jolly time making fun of the words you put in your imaginary explainer’s mouths, but at the end of the day, you have to return to the real world, empty handed.
I cannot forbear noting, on a rather more serious note, that such ostentatiously unsearched ridicule as Fodor heaps on Darwinians here is both very rude and very risky to one’s reputation. Before other philosophers countenance it they might want to bear in mind that the reaction of most biologists to this sort of performance is apt to be–at best: ‘Well, we needn’t bother paying any attention to him. He’s just one of those philosophers playing games with words’. It may be fun, but it contributes to the disrespect that many non-philosophers have for our so-called discipline.
