AGAINST DARWINISM
Jerry Fodor
Rutgers University
Email: Jerry.Fodor@Verizon.net
Preface
This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what happens when you try to integrate Darwinism with an intentional theory like propositional attitude psychology. And then, still further on, it struck me that what the paper was really about wasn’t the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intentional (with a `t’), but the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intensional (with an `s`).1 The latter is more worrying since Darwinism, or anyhow adaptationism, is itself committed to intensionally individuated processes like `selection for.’ So the claim turned out to be that there is something seriously wrong with adaptationism per se. Having gotten that far, I could have rewritten this as straightforwardly a paper about adaptationism, thereby covering my tracks. But I decided not to do so. It seems to me of interest to chart a route from being suspicious of Evolutionary Psychology to having one’s doubts about the whole adaptationist enterprise.
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
Jerry Fodor (filósofo) é co-autor de What Darwin got wrong juntamente com Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (biólogo molecular): um livro que vai dar o que falar na Nomenklatura científica, e a Galera dos meninos e meninas de Darwin vai estrebuchar de raiva: Darwin errou até na seleção natural!
