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
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<.> Prima facie, the picture of the mind, indeed of human nature in general, that psychological Darwinism suggest is preposterous; a sort of jumped up, down-market version of original sin. Psychological Darwinism is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behaviour by imputing an interest (viz. in the proliferation of the genome) that the agent of the behaviour does not acknowledge. When literal conspiracies are alleged, duplicity is generally part of the charge: 'He wasn't making confetti; he was shredding the evidence. He did X in aid of Y, and then he lied about his motive.' But in the kind of conspiracy theories psychologists like best, the motive is supposed to be inaccessible even to the agent, who is thus perfectly sincere in denying the imputation. In the extreme case, it's hardly even the agent to whom the motive is attributed. Freudian explanations provide a familiar example: What seemed to be merely Jones's slip of the tongue was the unconscious expression of a libidinous impulse. But not Jones's libidinous impulse, really; one that his Id had on his behalf. Likewise, for the psychological Darwinist: what seemed to be your, after all, unsurprising interest in your child's well-being turns out to be your genes' conspiracy to propagate themselves. Not your conspiracy, notice, but theirs.
How do you make the case that Jones did X in aid of an interest in Y, when Y is an interest that Jones doesn't own to? The idea is perfectly familiar: you argue that X would have been the rational (reasonable, intelligible) thing for Jones to do if Y had been his motive. Such arguments can be very persuasive. The files Jones shredded were precisely the ones that would have incriminated him; and he shredded them in the middle of the night. What better explanation than that Jones conspired to destroy the evidence? Likewise when the conspiracy is unconscious. Suppose that an interest in the propagation of the genome would rationalise monogamous families in animals whose offspring mature slowly. Well, our offspring do mature slowly; and our species does, by and large, favour monogamous families. So that's evidence that we favour monogamous families because we have an interest in the propagation of our genes. Well, isn't it? Maybe yes, maybe no; this kind of inference needs to be handled with great care. For, often enough, where an interest in X would rationalise Y, so too would an interest in P, Q or R. It's reasonable of Jones to carry an umbrella if it's raining and he wants to keep dry. But, likewise, it's reasonable for Jones to carry an umbrella if he has in mind to return it to its owner. Since either motivation would rationalise the way that Jones behaved, his having behaved that way is compatible with either imputation. This is, in fact, overwhelmingly the general case: there are, most often, all sorts of interests which would rationalise the kinds of behaviour that a creature is observed to produce. What's needed to make it decisive that the creature is interested in Y is that it should produce a kind of behaviour that would be reasonable only given an interest in Y. But such cases are vanishingly rare since, if an interest in Y would rationalise doing X, so too would an interest in doing X. A concern to propagate one's genes would rationalise one's acting to promote one's children's welfare; but so too would an interest in one's childrens' welfare. Not all of one's motives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn't there be quite a few such things? Why shouldn't one's children be among them?
The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature's behaviour is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalise the behaviour if it were the creature's motive. Pinker's book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start. Here he is on friendship:
Once you have made yourself valuable to someone, the person becomes valuable to you. You value him or her because if you were ever in trouble, they would have a stake - albeit a selfish stake - in getting you out. But now that you value the person, they should value you even more . . . because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship.'
<.> At one point Pinker quotes H.L. Mencken's wisecrack that 'the most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.' Quite so. I suppose it could turn out that one's interest in having friends, or in reading fictions, or in Wagner's operas, is really at heart prudential. But the claim affronts a robust, and I should think salubrious, intuition that there are lots and lots of things that we care about simply for themselves. Reductionism about this plurality of goals, when not Philistine or cheaply cynical, often sounds simply funny. Thus the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex by a beautiful girl. 'Well, I guess so,' he replies, 'but what's in it for me?' Does wanting to have a beautiful woman - or, for that matter, a good read - really require a further motive to explain it? Pinker duly supplies the explanation that you wouldn't have thought that you needed. 'Both sexes want a spouse who has developed normally and is free of infection . . . We haven't evolved stethoscopes or tongue-depressors, but an eye for beauty does some of the same things . . . Luxuriant hair is always pleasing, possibly because . . . long hair implies a long history of good health.'
Much to his credit, Pinker does seem a bit embarrassed about some of these consequences of his adaptationism, and he does try to duck them.
Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that 'animals try to spread their genes'. This misstates . . . the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. . . What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes 'try' to spread themselves (sic) by wiring animals brains so that animals love their kin . . . and then the[y] get out of the way.
This version sounds a lot more plausible; strictly speaking, nobody has as a motive ('conscious or unconscious') the proliferation of genes after all. Not animals, and not genes either. The only real motives are the ones that everybody knows about; of which love of novels, or women, or kin are presumably a few among many. But, pace Pinker, this reasonable view is not available to a psychological Darwinist. For to say that the genes 'wire animals brains so that animals love their kin' and to stop there is to say only that loving their kin is innate in these animals. That reduces psychological Darwinism to mere nativism; which, as I remarked above, is common ground to all of us Rationalists. The difference between Darwinism and mere nativism is the claim that a creature's innate psychological traits are adaptations; viz. that their role in the propagation of the genes is what they're for. Take the adaptationism away from a psychological Darwinist and he has nobody left to argue with except empiricists. It is, then, adaptationism that makes Pinker and Plotkin's kind of rationalism special. Does this argument among nativists really matter? Nativism itself clearly does; everybody cares about human nature. But I have fussed a lot about the difference between nativism and Darwinism, and you might reasonably want to know why anyone should care about that.
For one thing, nativism says there has to be a human nature, but it's the adaptationism that implies the account of human nature that sociobiologists endorse. If, like me, you find that account grotesquely implausible, it's perhaps the adaptationism rather than the nativism that you ought to consider throwing overboard. Pinker remarks that 'people who study the mind would rather not have to think about how it evolved because it would make a hash of cherished theories . . . When advised that [their] claims are evolutionarily implausible, they attack the theory of evolution rather than rethinking the claim.' I think this is exactly right, though the formulation is a bit tendentious. We know - anyhow we think that we do - a lot about ourselves that doesn't seem to square with the theory that our minds are adaptations for spreading our genes. The question may well come down to which theory we should give up. Well, as far as I can tell, if you take away the bad argument that turns on complexity, and the bad argument from reverse engineering, and the bad arguments that depend on committing the rationalisation fallacy, and the atrociously bad arguments that depend on preempting what's to count as the 'scientific' (and/or the biological) world view, the direct evidence for psychological Darwinism is very slim indeed. In particular, it's arguably much worse than the indirect evidence for our intuitive, pluralistic theory of human nature. It is, after all, our intuitive pluralism that we use to get along with one another. And I have the impression that, by and large, it works pretty well.