-- Luke
Quoting ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org>:
>
>
> posted below y'day but was rejected (size). entire text is very
> relevant/interesting to the debate. have snipped it down and posting
> it in 2 parts. suggest you follow link to read the rest of it.
>
> --ravi
>
> http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Fodor_on_Pinker_98.html
>
> The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism
> Jerry Fodor
>
> How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
> Evolution in Mind by Henry Plotkin
>
> [1 of 2]
>
> <.>
>
> Pinker and Plotkin are
> reporting a minority consensus. Most cognitive scientists still work in
> a tradition of empiricism and associationism whose main tenets haven't
> changed much since Locke and Hume. The human mind is a blank slate at
> birth. Experience writes on the slate, and association extracts and
> extrapolates whatever trends there are in the record that experience
> leaves.
>
> <.>
>
> Pinker and Plotkin, by contrast, epitomise a rationalist revival that
> started about forty years ago with Chomsky's work on the syntax of
> natural languages and that is by now sufficiently robust to offer a
> serious alternative to the empiricist tradition. Like Pinker and
> Plotkin, I think the New Rationalism is the best story about the mind
> that science has found to tell so far. But I think their version of that
> story is tendentious, indeed importantly flawed. <.> Our best scientific
> theory about the mind is better than empiricism; but, in all sorts of
> ways, it's still not very good. <.>
>
> Pinker elaborates his version of rationalism around four basic ideas:
> the mind as computational system; the mind is massively modular; a lot
> of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is innate;
> a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is an
> evolutionary adaptation - in particular, the function of a creature's
> nervous system is to abet the propagation of its genome (its selfish
> gene, as one says). <.>
> Both authors take for granted that psychology should be a
> part of biology and they are both emphatic about the need for more
> Darwinian thinking in cognitive science. <.>
> It's their Darwinism, specifically their allegiance to
> a 'selfish gene' account of the phylogeny of the mind, that most
> strikingly distinguishes Pinker and Plotkin from a number of their
> rationalist colleagues (and from Chomsky in particular). All this needs
> some looking into. I'll offer a sketch of how the four pieces of
> Pinker-Plotkin's version of rationalism are connected; and, by
> implication, of what an alternative rationalism might look like. I'm
> particularly interested in how much of the Pinker-Plotkin consensus
> turns on the stuff about selfish genes, of which I don't, in fact,
> believe a word.
>
> Computation.
>
> <.>
>
> Massive modularity.
>
> <.>
>
> Innateness.
>
> Rationalists are nativists by definition; and nativism is where
> cognitive science touches the real world. As both Pinker and Plotkin
> rightly emphasise, the standard view in current social science - and in
> what's called 'literary theory' - takes a form of Empiricism for
> granted: human nature is arbitrarily plastic and minds are social
> constructs. By contrast, the evidence from cognitive science is that a
> lot of what's in the modules seems to be there innately. Pinker and
> Plotkin both review a fair sample of this evidence, including some of
> the lovely experimental work on infant cognition that psychologists have
> done in the last couple of decades. There is also, as the linguists have
> been claiming for years, a lot of indirect evidence that points to much
> the same conclusion: all human languages appear to e structurally
> similar in profound and surprising ways. There may be an alternative to
> the nativist explanation that linguistic structure is genetically
> specified; but, if there is, nobody has thus far had a glimpse of it.
> (For a review, see Pinker's earlier book, The Language Instinct).
> Cultural relativism is widely held to be politically correct. So, sooner
> or later, political correctness and cognitive science are going to
> collide. Many tears will be shed and many hands will be wrung in public.
> Be that as it may; if there is a human nature, and it is to some
> interesting extent genetically determined, it is folly for humanists to
> ignore it. We're animals whatever else we are; and what makes an animal
> well and happy and sane depends a lot on what kind of animal it is.
> Pinker and Plotkin are both very good on this; I commend them to you.
> But, for present purposes, I want to examine a different aspect of their
> Rationalism: psychological Darwinism. Pinker and Plotkin both believe
> that if nativism is the right story about cognition, it follows that
> much of our psychology must be, in the Darwinian sense, an evolutionary
> adaptation; that is, it must be intelligible in light of evolutionary
> selection pressures that shaped it. It's the nativism that makes
> cognitive science politically interesting. But it's the inference from
> nativism to Darwinism that is currently divisive within the New
> Rationalist community. Pinker and Plotkin are selling an evolutionary
> approach to psychology that a lot of cognitive scientists (myself
> included) aren't buying. There are two standard arguments, both of which
> Pinker and Plotkin endorse, that are supposed to underwrite the
> inference from nativism to psychological Darwinism. The first is
> empirical, the second methodological. I suspect that both are wrong-headed.
>
> The empirical argument is that, as a matter of fact, there is no way
> except evolutionary selection for Nature to build a complex, adaptive
> system. Plotkin says 'neo-Darwinian theory [is] the central theorem of
> all biology, including behavioural biology'; 'if behaviour is adaptive,
> then it must be the product of evolution.' Likewise Pinker: 'Natural
> selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve
> . . . [so] natural selection is indispensable to understanding the human
> mind.' One reply to this argument is to say that there is, after all, an
> alternative to natural selection as the source of adaptive complexity;
> you could get some by a miracle. But I'm not a Creationist, nor are any
> of my New Rationalist friends, as far as I know. Nor do we have to be,
> since there's another way out of the complexity argument. This is a long
> story, but here's the gist: it's common ground that the evolution of our
> behaviour was mediated by the evolution of our brains. So, what matters
> with regard to the question whether the mind is an adaptation is not how
> complex our behaviour is, but how much change you would have to make in
> an ape's brain to produce the cognitive structure of a human mind. And
> about this, exactly nothing is known. That' because nothing is known
> about how the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our
> brains. Nobody even knows which brain structures it is that our
> cognitive capacities depend on. Unlike our minds, our brains are, by any
> gross measure, very like those of apes. So it looks as though relatively
> small alterations of brain structure must have produced very large
> behavioural discontinuities in the transition from the ancestral apes to
> us. If that's right, then you don't have to assume that cognitive
> complexity is shaped by the gradual action of Darwinian selection on
> prehuman behavioural phenotypes. Analogies to the evolution of organic
> structures, though they pervade the literature of psychological
> Darwinism, don't actually cut much ice here. Make the giraffe's neck
> just a little longer and you correspondingly increase, by just a little,
> the animal's capacity to reach he fruit at the top of the tree. So it's
> plausible, to that extent, that selection stretched giraffes' necks bit
> by bit. But make an ape's brain just a little bigger (or denser, or more
> folded, or, who knows, greyer) and it's anybody's guess what happens to
> the creature's behavioural repertoire. Maybe the ape turns into us.
> Adaptationists say about the phylogeny of cognition that it's a choice
> between Darwin and God and they like to parade as scientifically
> tough-minded about which one of these you should pick. But that
> misstates the alternatives, so don't let yourself be bullied. In fact,
> we don't know what the scientifically reasonable view of the phylogeny
> of behaviour is; nor will we until we begin to understand how behaviour
> is subserved by the brain. And never mind tough-mindedness; what matters
> is what's true. <.>
>
> One last point about the status of the inference from nativism to
> psychological Darwinism. If the mind is mostly a collection of innate
> modules, then pretty clearly it must have evolved gradually, under
> selection pressure. That's because, as I remarked above, modules contain
> lots of specialised information about the problem-domains that they
> compute in. And it really would be a miracle if all those details got
> into brains via a relative small, fortuitous alteration of the
> neurology. To put it the other way around, if adaptationism isn't true
> in psychology, it must be that what makes our minds so clever is
> something pretty general; something about their global structure. The
> moral is that if you aren't into psychological Darwinism, you shouldn't
> be into massive modularity either. Everything connects. For the sake of
> the argument, however, let's suppose that the mind is an adaptation
> after all and see where that leads. It's a point of definition that
> adaptations have to be for something. Pinker and Plotkin both accept the
> 'selfish gene' story about what biological adaptations are for. Organic
> structure is (mostly) in aid of the propagation of the genes. And so is
> brain structure inter alia. And so is cognitive structure, since how the
> mind works depends on how the brain does. So there's a route from
> Darwinism to socio-biology; and Pinker, at least, is keen to take it.
> (Plotkin seems a bit less so. He's content to argue that some of the
> notorious problems for the selfish gene theory - the phylogeny of
> altruism, for example - may be less decisive than one might at first
> suppose. I think that settling for that is very wise of him.)
>
> <contd...>
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