“Intension” vs “Intention”
Emerson Hall, Harvard University (cc photo by Dan4th)
Back when I was in college I thought the philosopher’s distinction between “intensional” with an “s” and “intentional” with a “t” was a sick joke designed to confuse undergraduates and the typo-prone. So I’m heartened to see that in his paper “Against Darwinism” (via Tyler Cowen), Jerry Fodor has a footnote lambasting this nonsense:
It’s hard to imagine a less fortunate terminology than the philosopher’s ‘intention/intension’ distinction. But I suppose there’s nothing can be done at this late date. In what follows, an intensional context is one in which the substitution of coextensive expressions isn’t valid. Intentional states are just the familiar beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth that populate theories of cognition and of the integration of behavior.
I don’t really think the philosophical community should adopt this fatalistic “there’s nothing can be done” attitude. Surely this is what professional associations are for. This is a very, very confusing terminological choice and it helps nobody.
At any rate, haven’t read the paper beyond this footnote, but I have strong feelings on this issue.
54 Responses to ““Intension” vs “Intention””
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July 30th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Imagine, then, a Philosophic equivalent of a Boy Scout Jamboree.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Matt, have you read DFW’s essay on language? Because if not, you should:
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
July 30th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Well, in statistical null hypothesis significance testing, they still refer to Type I and Type II error.
It’s hard to think of a label that is less descriptive. It still irritates me that I have to teach that terminology to students.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Surely this is what professional associations are for. This is a very, very confusing terminological choice and it helps nobody.
Professional associations are for raising barriers to entry in the relevant labor markets. Fostering obscure technical jargon is just a part of that game.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
What the philosophical community shouldn’t take a fatalistic attitude towards is its senior members running around in public ignorantly denying the theoretical basis of the life sciences.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I assure you, the confusion is purely intensional.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Jerry Fodor’s always fun. Verbose son of a gun
July 30th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“This is a very, very confusing terminological choice…”
C’mon, Matt; Fodor just explained it, in two sentences. It’s not hard.
But if you really need to refer to the two concepts using words that are spelled very differently, “referential opacity” works pretty well as a substitute for “intensionality.”
–PK
July 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Thanks for clearing that up.
BTW, this is why people hate you.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I’ve been dreading Fodor’s book for awhile. It’s bound to be a train wreck. From his earlier writings it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t understand how modern evolutioanary therory works, and the rightful dismal by biologists of his arguments is going to make the whole field of philosophy bad.
On the other hand, he is advancing some fairly subtle philosophical arguments, and biologists are likely to misrepresent them, so he is going to come away thinking he won the fight some how.
Should be interesting none the less.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
the rightful dismal by biologists
Brother, ain’t that the truth?
July 30th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Well, at least the footnote clarified what intensional means. I mean have had this problem where I just couldn’t substitute my coextensive expressions and now I see why.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
See also interpleader and impleader in legal terminology.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Do you have any temptation to spell “extension” as “extention?” If not (and I hope you don’t), then it should be easy to remember whether you’re dealing with an intention or an intension; if it’s meant to be opposed to an extension, it should have the same last four letters. Doesn’t help when the words are spoken out loud, I suppose, but I really think you exaggerate how difficult it is to keep this straight.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Hey guys, where did Matt go to school again? I forget.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
C’mon, Matt; Fodor just explained it, in two sentences. It’s not hard.
The biggest objection to it is that the two words are pronounced almost identically. In writting, it’s not so bad, but imagine trying to understand a lecture on the distinction.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
While we’re at it, let’s scrap “intentional” too. I suggest we replace it with “abouty”.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
What is Matt that thou are mindful of him?
Matt is the measure of all things.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
But Matt, you can’t spell anyway! Why do you care?
July 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Jerry Fodor is so gangster he should spell his name with a G. /rutgersphilosophydept
July 30th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Two points
1. I don’t think many philosophers are on board with Fodor’s critique. Certainly when I saw him give a talk on one of his chapters (to the society for philosophy and psychology), the audience was unimpressed.
2. From what I’ve read of it (not including this paper, but the TLS exchanges and so on), Fodor’s argument is pretty narrow. While he’s doing things like titling papers “Against Darwinism”, he accepts the theory of common descent, and the idea that mutations which cause their bearers to produce more offspring are a key source of change. I know of nowhere where he buys into the supernatural causes involved in intelligent design or creationism. His problem is more or less with the idea that we can meaningfully explain anything by talking about this as a process of adaptation.
Really, his critique is the kind of issue that, even if true, would only matter for philosophers, biologists and evolutionary psychologists. And maybe not that many of the latter two.
July 30th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
“But Matt, you can’t spell anyway! Why do you care?”
That’s exactly why he cares. The fewer distinctions that depend on letters the better as far as he is concerned.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Not a philosopher and no desire to be one: but having two contrasting technical terms represented by the same word is FUCKING STUPID.
Yes, they are represented by the same word: you can’t distinguish them in speech, so if you philosophers EVER talk about these things, you have to elaborate any way. You’d think philosophers would be better and spotting absolute stupidity like this.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Searle has taken to calling them intention-with-a-t and intension-with-an-s. Of course the expansive notion of intentionality is a confusing name in its own right.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
But will we distinguish the intense from the intent?
July 30th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Actually Tim, they’re called homonyms, and you can distinguish them by the context in which they’re used. Furthermore, philosophy is full of words with multiple senses (for example, “sense”). It makes no sense to call out intensionality and intentionality.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Fodor is just wrong; Darwinism is in no sense committed to the intensionality of natural selection. Any apparent intension in terms like “select for” is just the result of metaphor in attempt to make communication about high-level evolutionary process easier. No prominent biologist I know of would claim that “selection for trait x at time t” implies anything other than a statistically higher probability of survival for organisms with trait x at time t relative to nearly identical organisms without trait t. This implies nothing functional, teleological, or in any other sense intensional about the selection process; the claim is purely statistical.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I actually had a seminar class on this vary topic (and Prof. Fodor generously allowed us to review the manuscript of his current book, in progress with Massimo Piatelli-Parmarini).
I can assure you it is mostly the same as the article, but incorporates another line of argument: JF draws a tight comparison between natural selection and behaviorism (the random generation and fixation common to both of them) and uses the standard critique of behaviorism on “Darwinism” (whatever Darwinism means, and Fodor is never entirely clear on who he is at odds with).
The arguments are definitely philosophers arguments, but they should be taken seriously. How can we say with any certainty which traits were selected through a process about which there are no general laws and no counterfactuals to analyze (because of its necessary mindlessness)? That is, in one sentence, JF’s question. There are plenty of arguments to dis-horn his dilemma, but the arguments are subtle, and knee jerk reactions in the defense of Science (with a capital S) are frankly silly.
The issue of Mind and Language which contained this article has fascinating replies, the highlight being Elliot Sober’s, although Dennett’s is obviously a fun read (if not at ALL civil). Sober’s book “The Nature of Selection” (1993) is a great philosophical discussion of these issues, pitched at a high level and grounded in the facts of life sciences. Fodor’s book (tentatively titled “What Darwin Got Wrong” continuing his cavalier style of calling attention to this issue) is MUCH less grounded in empirical facts, at this point at least. Not to criticize a child half-born, I think it’s safe to say that if the book ends up with as much scientific attention as the article, it will not be well received by the community of academic scientists.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
@PK “But if you really need to refer to the two concepts using words that are spelled very differently, “referential opacity” works pretty well as a substitute for “intensionality.””
But there’s also the use of “intension” that is equivalent to “meaning of an expression” (see Carnap).
Of course, the APA (or any other group for that matter) has no power over terminological choices like this. Though, it should be noted that the problem is only when speaking, and then occurs only rarely (though more often if you talk a lot of philosophy of mind).
Also, fwiw, in classic treatments of intensionality (Frege is the most obvious example here), in some sense you *can* substitute coreferring e.g. names in intensional contexts because terms shift reference in this context and refer to their meaning.
@Justin Fodor is no IDist.
@Realist I don’t think that “select for” needs to be read statistically as you do. Very generally, a feature F is selected for when F’s being present explains why something which has F exists. It’s more than just the statistical concept you mention because a feature F and a feature G may be linked together (actually coextensive) though only one selected for. (So the sound a heart makes may be coextensive with pumping blood around the body; the latter is the feature that is selected for even though the probability of survival on having a heart that makes the sound a heart makes is higher than the probability of survival on having a heart which doesn’t make that sound.)
Fodor’s claim is that a feature F might be selected for under one description but not under another, or at least this certainly seems to be what he’s about from the claim about intensionality and selection for in the first paragraph.
And Fodor is dead right to be skeptical of evolutionary psychology.
July 30th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
“How can we say with any certainty which traits were selected through a process about which there are no general laws and no counterfactuals to analyze (because of its necessary mindlessness)?”
I don’t get this. I take it the first part of this isn’t epistemic, so the sentence asserts (by implicature, and in the mouth of Fodor) that there are no true counterfactuals concerning evolutionary processes? Why think this? Here’s one: An organism born with a kidney in place of every organ would not survive and pass on its genes.
Elliott Sober is good; I always recommend him to scientists wanting to read phil bio. Good guy, too.
July 30th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Realist (#27) is on the money here.
As a molecular biologist, I’m pretty skeptical of evopsych in general, but mostly because of the difficulty in performing rigorous phylogenetic analyses on psychological traits. Fodor seems to be deeply confused about what evolution is- it’s not a directed process that “selects for” anything. It’s a description of the mechanisms by which traits are genetically transmitted and changed. Arguing about the semantic content of the verbs biologists use to describe these processes elides the actual methodological problems with evopsych.
Also, “Darwinism” is a word used by creationists/ID types. No evolutionary biologist would currently describe themselves as a “darwinist” because Darwin’s theories are not used in their original form anywhere in biology.
July 30th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
The Lorax- “Very generally, a feature F is selected for when F’s being present explains why something which has F exists.”
You really shouldn’t expound on evolution if this is the best you can do for a definition of “natural selection”.
July 30th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
@Lorax. “I don’t get this. I take it the first part of this isn’t epistemic, so the sentence asserts (by implicature, and in the mouth of Fodor) that there are no true counterfactuals concerning evolutionary processes? Why think this? Here’s one: An organism born with a kidney in place of every organ would not survive and pass on its genes.”
This isn’t quite what JF is getting at, on my reading. Natural selection would never come across having to select against “nepro-pods” (if you will), or against them, for that matter. And counterfactual analysis in this instance seems to apply more to why things ARE the way that they are, not proving why things are not the way they are not.
JF’s example is the reflex snapping of frogs at flies. We could ask: what was selected here exactly, because flies are also “Moving Black Dots” or “Ambient Black Nuisances.” Well, we can easily find out by throwing BBs across a frogs field of vision and see if they snap at those too — they do. So natural selection selected the trait of snapping at black dots, not flies.
JF’s use of counterfactual analysis focuses on traits and how to disentangle coextensive ones. Say I build a car and it is both fast and uses a lot of gas. How can you tell what kind of car I wanted? Ask me what kind of car I would build in a world where cars can run more efficiently on water. Either I will build a fast water-based car or I will build a slow gas-guzzling car.
But how does natural selection do this? It’s easy to tell what kind of car I wanted to build, you can subject my intentional action to a counterfactual analysis. But this is not the same for natural selection because it has no mind. We can even find out what trait was selected for in me or even in frogs, but how did natural selection figure that out (metaphorically)?
JF has a neat encapsulation: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown, and thereby decreased his fitness.” Fodor means to say that this seems ridiculous because the maxim of Jack’s act was not fitness-decreasing, prima facie. Water-fetching is a very important behavior, and if anything it should be a part of our evolutionary stock to fetch water when thirsty. But Jack’s fitness was negatively impacted by that particular behavior, crown and all. JF wants us (desperately) to connect this with evo psych and their claims on behavior — how does natural selection tease out the coextensive traits, especially those which come part and parcel with behavior.
Really what’s up here is JF’s continuing attack on evo psych. His argument is that not only can we not tell what kinds of behaviors evolution selects, but it’s not the case that evolution selects any behaviors at all (he spends a page or so belaboring the point that he’s wearing his “metaphysical hat” and not his epistemic one).
JF tells a story at the end of his article about “getting rich.” There’s a way that Bill Gates got rich and there’s a way that Genghis Khan got rich. Both of them got rich, but there is no generalization to be made about richness tout court from them — or from anyone getting rich — except vacuous over-generalizations like “they all got rich.” JF feels this applies to the paths of evolution. One individual did well because of the sum total of its ecology and he feels there is too deep a difference between individuals in the game of life to say that one trait was selected in an entire species. JF has spent decades fighting the fight against reductionism between basic and special sciences (mostly fighting on the multiple realization front, as best I can tell). He wants us to conclude that “traits” are not just multiply realizable, but massively multiply realizable — so much so that there really are no facts of the matter at all in evolution except for the ones that matter to one particular instance.
He prefers, instead, to refer to the “natural history” of evolution, a post hoc story about how things came to be in the way that they are. Is this the right track to be on? Almost certainly not, by any evaluation. Jerry’s heart is in the right place (at least for me) in his critique of evo psych, but his head is mostly in the clouds on this one. Personally, I find it hard to see how his argument is not an epistemic one which would simply call out for a closer examination of the facts of the matter and a careful use of the local context to blunt the coarseness of evolutionary generalizations. But, alas, I’m not the New Jersey State Professor of Philosophy (at least not in this particular world — counterfactually, the question is up in the air).
July 30th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Lorax,
It’s more than just the statistical concept you mention because a feature F and a feature G may be linked together (actually coextensive) though only one selected for.
Yes, that’s why I said that a trait x is selected if organisms with trait x have a higher likelihood of survival than an organism identical except without trait x. That later organism is entirely hypothetical; if two traits are perfectly linked in reality then it is impossible to tell which is selected.
And Fodor is dead right to be skeptical of evolutionary psychology.
The most annoying thing about that paper is that Fodor completely ignores the classical literature in evolutionary biology of establishment evolutionists criticizing the various misconceptions made within their own field. The heaviest critic of evo psych, of adaptionalism, of “just so” stories, is the evolutionary biology establishment, and Fodor just doesn’t seem to understand he’s aligning himself with the orthodox position against the rebels, preferring to see himself as a persecuted apostate instead.
July 30th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
@29 Didn’t say he was, though I coulda been more emphatic in saying that he wasn’t.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
I am not intensionally making light of an important issue, but are you sure you want to type “typo-prone ?” I am actually relatively not so totally pissed about the word intensional as I never knew a term for a context in which “the substitution of coextensive expressions isn’t valid.”
I think the way to achieve you intension is to write something intensional without using “intensional.” Rather coin a new term (preferably not praetocoextensional) as follows
The context “you can lead a … but you can’t make her think” of the word “horticulture” is/is not pratotocoextensional. Haven’t the faintest whether or not it is intensional.
I would never laugh at “you can lead a gardening but you can’t make her think” but, then again, I never found “you can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her thing” the slightest bit funny either.
As your post stands, it seems to be intensionally unclear lording over us your understanding of the meaning of intensional.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
@29: “But there’s also the use of “intension” that is equivalent to “meaning of an expression” (see Carnap).”
Or better, go back to Frege, and make the sinn vs. bedeutung distinction.
IMO it was Brentano who is responsible for confusing everybody about this, but really, it’s been cleared up by now. Fodor is just laying out in admirably brief fashion the current wisdom on the topic.
–PK
July 30th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
You’re not a evolutionary biologist, are you? I’m not either—but pending the input of someone who is (dbt?), I’ll say that this isn’t my impression at all. Since Williams, adaptationism is the dominant paradigm in evolutionary biology. The only people who think otherwise are non-experts who have primarily learned of the arguments in evolutionary theory via Gould’s pop-science writing whose knowledge of the field was quite dated even by the 80s.
That’s not to say that there isn’t valid criticism of EP in the style you indicate among mainstream evolutionary scientists. As dbt says, the actual science being done in EP is very sketchy and, sadly, therefore the field is easily hijacked by those with ulterior motives of the sociopolitical sort. I, too, as a layperson, am very skeptical of much EP, especially as it’s presented in the popular press.
At root, however, it really does seem to me that—within the public sphere, anyway—this is a deeply philosophical and political argument in the least rigorous senses of those terms. Some people want to preserve the notion of human exceptionalism, that the human mind is essentially not purely a product of biology and thus not a product of evolution. Others, like myself, think quite differently. This describes those who take positions on this on purely theoretical grounds.
Alternatively, I think that many of the people arguing this, on both sides, are taking their positions more out of a functional and pragmatic motivation than anything else. Sociobiology and EP—not unlike evolutionary theory early in its development—have been quickly exploited by cultural conservatives who want to codify their beloved status quo into naturalist theory. So, from a purely political standpoint, everyone with an interest in progressivism has a motivation to take the opposing side and decry, with passion, EP at every opportunity. Which one sees quite often.
My concern is that this functionalist and pragmatic response is the response to a false dilemma. As much as there are many who struggle valiantly to preserve what is essentially the metaphysical supposition about human nature, it seems to me that this is profoundly anti-scientific and, frankly, ignorant when it comes to something that is within science’s purview (as, increasingly, cognition and human behavior do). There is no evidence that we are not purely biological creatures who have evolved behaviors just like other animals; there is an enormous amount of evidence that we are.
Yet, regardless of this, and, provocatively, regardless of how much we are already aware that we are creatures of biology (our cognition is, at least in some ways, inarguably and uncontroversially driven by biology) we’ve nevertheless established social customs and institutions to allow us to have more control over ourselves and who we’d like to be, how we’d like to act. That we have numerous behaviors which are evolutionary adaptations—that, indeed, men and women think and behave differently because of evolutionary adaptation—is not a death knell for progressivism and social justice. Whatever these differences may be, it well may be necessary that we understand them before we culturally correct for whatever injustices they otherwise create.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Matthew; you’re wrong (and you’re a grotesquely ugly freak, etc.)
Fodor obfuscates his definitions to make the distinction look inscrutable; but an intenSional context is where a particular thing is intended, and intenTional state one having to do with our intentions.
For people with a solid grasp of latinate derivations, which needn’t include all undergraduates, this isn’t problematic. For those without, if and only if they want to study philosophy further, where this might become germane… just effing deal with it.
(love the occasional philosophy of language digressions – please do continue)
July 30th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
an intenSional context is where a particular thing is intended, and intenTional state one having to do with our intentions.
OMFG, just when I thought it couldn’t get any less clear…
July 30th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Re: There is no evidence that we are not purely biological creatures who have evolved behaviors just like other animals; there is an enormous amount of evidence that we are.
We have an immortal soul, of course, which isn’t the product of evolution, and therefore we cannot fairly be described as ‘purely biological creatures’.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Hector, you are joking right? Could you point out where your immortal soul is? I seem to have misplaced mine.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:19 am
No, “of course”, about it. That’s a matter of pure opinion, not fact, and not supported by any empirical evidence whatsoever. I understand and respect that by far the larger portion of humanity believes in the soul. But then, a large portion of humanity believes a great many things which are demonstrably untrue—so believing something that has never been proven untrue (though also never proven true) is relatively excusable, I suppose.
Nevertheless, I find it ironic and unfortunate that the same progressives who rail against creationism and against the anti-environmentalist, exceptionalist Christian view of Man’s dominion over the Earth and Beasts implicitly support the same exceptionalist view of humanity with regard to the rest of nature. It’s hubristic anthropocentricism in its most extreme form and the history of the natural sciences shows a clear progression of erosion of these sorts of claims. It cuts both directions: the same tendency to exalt humans and our cognition and will has long denied in animals anything and everything we like to think (or, conversely, are ashamed to think) are unique to ourselves: free will, forethought, love and hate, charity and selfishness, humor, and many other things. Increasingly, though, researchers have come to identify all these things in animal cognition and behavior.
Chief among the claims among those who deny the influence of biology on human cognition and behavior is the importance of culture—it’s not accident that culture, too, has long been denied other animals as a theoretical matter-of-course. Yet, researchers are identifying culturally learned behaviors in animals at an increasing pace. It’s clear that a number of animals have identifiable culture. If we want to exempt ourselves from evolutionary “control”, perhaps we should be exempting them, too?
Well, “of course” not.
One of the feel-good tenets often espoused by more mainstream atheists as well as theist scientists is that the intellectual contexts of faith and science don’t intersect, that they are distinct and wholly separate domains of knowledge. While I usually argue against the strident among my fellow atheists, here I agree with them: in some senses this claim is true, but in others it is nonsense. In particularly, some portions of religious belief make definite claims about the nature of empirical reality. Not the least among these is the nature of human behavior and cognition. The metaphysics of the soul makes a claim about the actual physics and biology of personhood: the biology, the activity of the brain, and thus the whole person, is necessarily directed by the immaterial soul. As Dennet (IIRC) once wrote, if the soul directs the brain, then there is necessarily a physical, not merely metaphysical, relationship between the two. This is a testable claim about the nature of reality. It it a matter of empiricism.
More to the point, the long history of the science of the biology of the human body has demonstrated the ever elusive search for the existence and nature of the soul. From merely locating it, to the attempt to weigh it, biologists have ever conveniently attempted to place the soul right past the edge of what can be empirically tested. People like Penrose have attempted this in modern times via complex and hand-waving arguments about quantum mechanics and brain physiology. And over this entire history, these arguments have yielded to the light of encroaching scientific progress…no, the soul isn’t where it was hoped that it was.
The point is that it’s rather suspicious that the soul, not unlike God, has never yielded to any attempt at empirical verification. Modern theologians might argue why this must necessarily be the case (most pre-modern theologians and philosophers didn’t make such an argument because it simply wouldn’t occur to them: God exists, it obviously must be necessarily possible to prove that God exists), but such arguments are really convenient ex post facto sophistical rationalizations.
The problem with your position is that, like the creationists, you implicitly are increasingly forced to oppose the tide of scientific discovery in order to hold onto your assertions about the nature of reality and humanity. And, as I’ve already said, I find it very odd and ironic that the same can said of the progressives who also, for political reasons, have strong motivations to assert human anthropocentric exceptionalism.
I’d like to add that, in the same exact way that I think that, for example, contemporary progressive and feminist thought deeply opposes the EP claims of sexual cognitive dimorphism among humans because they intuitively feel certain that there’s a horribly unjust sociopolitical outcome down a slippery-slope starting from such claims, you commit the same fallacy with regard to all your arguments against modernism (which, as someone else noted, you clumsily conflate with postmodernism) and your belief that all of human culture is going to Hell in a handbasket because all notions of Right and Wrong and Justice and Injustice evaporate without your particular, essentially pre-Enlightenment views on morality and, I suppose, epistemology. But, of course, you’re just as wrong as the other group is. There is not necessarily the slippery slope you each think there is; and, even if there were, it’s not certain that we need slide down it. There are a great many counterexamples to your implicit and explicit claims about human behavior in the absence of your particular brand of moral philosophy, just as it’s revealing that many late 80s feminist theorist embraced a relatively radical version of human cognitive sexual dimorphism and it would be absurd to claim that those feminists were anti-feminist in doing so.
Your posting here reveals that more than having a coherent and deeply self-examined belief system, you have a cultural chip on your shoulder and you are driven to simplistic finger-pointing and vilification. Thus, your constant invocation of the evils of “hipsters”. For all your familiarity with intellectual giants such as Aquinas (and, recall, I too have read these theologians), they are mostly props that you use to add intellectual weight to what really are your simplistic and convenient rants against your one-dimensional villains. I somehow suspect that you could be so much better than this, as an intellectual.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:37 am
It seems like Fodor hasn’t read too much actual evolutionary biology, particularly the mathematical stuff. For instance, game theory provides a fairly general set of “laws”, which are considerably more than just-so stories. Historical explanations are not laws, of course, but science is not historical explanation (which means that much of evolutionary psychology, by that definition, is not science; Fodor’s right there). Science is about using general laws to predict future events, and game theory allows specific predictions about populations, and what will happen to them when X or Y historical events (ie, chance) intrude. They may not work very often, but there are laws. Similarly, molecular biology is also largely free of the contextualism/historicism that Fodor fears. We can predict what sorts of mutations will results in broken machinery and thus reduced fitness — fitness reduced under huge sets of plausible contexts. It’s true one can always make up some unlikely context where a broken enzyme becomes useful, but that’s no more a problem for evolutionary biology than it is for physics when one shows that the laws for fluid dynamics break down when the fluid evaporates. In short, Fodor’s claims of “not (b)” (see, eg, p 12) always fail, mainly because he makes that sub-argument with a few hand-wavy stories about context that reveal that he has read almost no real papers or books doing real biology.
That said, I’ve heard almost no “theory” in evolutionary psychology that wasn’t just a post-hoc just-so story. But that isn’t to say a real theory is impossible: instead of just theorizing about humans only, your theory could say that, because of such-and-such a result in game theory (eg), all mammalian group-hunters should laugh; and then you confirm it in all X extant cases, but one, and then you look more closely and discover that, like mice, they in fact vocalize ultrasonically; and then you discover a new species of group hunters, and they laugh too. And that’s a decent evolutionary psychology theory, if not a full-fledged Law. (Of course, if you’re a behavioralist who doesn’t believe in psychological states for non-human animals, then you’re a bit up the creek for any hope of a science of EP.)
July 31st, 2009 at 1:27 am
The heaviest critic of evo psych, of adaptionalism, of “just so” stories, is the evolutionary biology establishment, and Fodor just doesn’t seem to understand he’s aligning himself with the orthodox position against the rebels, preferring to see himself as a persecuted apostate instead
Correct. A 26-page polemic and not a nod to the classic anti-adaptationist metaphor, the spandrel? Allow me to come to the Professor’s aid with this link: http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html
Keith Ellis, Gould’s theoretical model of punctuated equilibrium, explaining the common pattern of evolutionary stasis and rapid change may have had its day, but the critique of adaptationism is a stalwart, utterly conventional.
July 31st, 2009 at 1:29 am
Keith,
You’re not a evolutionary biologist, are you?
Not yet. It is my field of study though.
Since Williams, adaptationism is the dominant paradigm in evolutionary biology.
Perhaps. We have to be more specific about what we mean by both “adaptionalism” and “dominant paradigm” for me to judge that statement (I don’t think the paradigm is as adaptionalist as it was 30 years ago). Nevertheless, whether successful or not, the sharpest criticisms of adaptionalism have come from within the establishment. Gould counts. And if you’re going to write a paper criticizing adaptionalism from an outsider standpoint you should mention this discussion within the field and not just repeat the points which have already been made and possibly refuted.
Some people want to preserve the notion of human exceptionalism, that the human mind is essentially not purely a product of biology and thus not a product of evolution. Others, like myself, think quite differently. This describes those who take positions on this on purely theoretical grounds.
If we’re going to speculate on motivations, I think it’s a lot simpler than that. Philosophers like attacking evolution because they know biologists are extremely defensive about it so it’ll get them a lot of attention. There is no other reason for a non-creationist to title a paper “Against Darwinism.”
I have no political stake either way; just scientific. Obviously humans are products of biology. But there are methodological problems with EP which I’m not sure are solvable (really the same problems as all the social sciences, plus a few more). None of them have anything to do with Fodor’s arguments, though.
July 31st, 2009 at 1:37 am
As those informed already guessed, my thinking on EP has been heavily influenced by Cosmides and Tooby, who I think have taken a rigorous approach to EP. Here is what they have to say on this particular subject, in direct response to Gould’s attacks on EP (which I think have very disproportionately affected public discourse on the topic and have misled many people into vastly oversimplifying EP to the point of caricature):
I understand that there are some valid and strong criticisms of C&T’s Wason selection task experiments; but it seems to me that this classic experiment of theirs is a good example of how they are properly using the scientific method to pose testable hypothesis and are not merely manufacturing “just so” stories. Having said that, I think that an unfortunately very high portion of the studies that appear in the popular press—at least, insofar as they are presented (which should be understood to be very unreliable, of course)—seem very much to be vulnerable to the “just so story” criticism. It’s why I’m certainly not committed to defending EP in every specific instance, but only in general.
I’d also like to add that predictability is a much more vague test for scientific validity than is often supposed. Large portions of a variety of sciences—notably geology and cosmology—make claims about reality that cannot be directly tested via prediction of future events. There’s a lot more of indirect evidence involved in science than many suppose and, especially because of the popular creationist critique of evolution and geology and paleontology and such, I’m very wary of simplistic arguments against scientific theory on the basis that something is in the remote past and not directly testable. As C&T argue above, there’s actually quite a bit of predictive, testable claims about human behavior that can follow from hypothesis about the evolution of human cognition. But they’re never going to “prove” that humans existed in a particular environment and were adapted to it via a particular mutation affecting cognition.
July 31st, 2009 at 3:33 am
@dbt 32: That was a first-blush shot at distinguishing between being selected for (as opposed to being selected) prompted by the statistical analysis above my comment. I was trying to show that that analysis misses some of the most general features of this distinction. Or so I thought there; I think there’s another comment on it.
July 31st, 2009 at 3:45 am
“But how does natural selection do this? It’s easy to tell what kind of car I wanted to build, you can subject my intentional action to a counterfactual analysis. But this is not the same for natural selection because it has no mind. We can even find out what trait was selected for in me or even in frogs, but how did natural selection figure that out (metaphorically)?”
Ok. Well, I still don’t see how the selects-for/selects distinction is in trouble here. We can tease them apart by asking which would be fitness-enhancing were the other of the two actually coextensive features not present.
“JF has a neat encapsulation: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown, and thereby decreased his fitness.” Fodor means to say that this seems ridiculous because the maxim of Jack’s act was not fitness-decreasing, prima facie. Water-fetching is a very important behavior, and if anything it should be a part of our evolutionary stock to fetch water when thirsty. But Jack’s fitness was negatively impacted by that particular behavior, crown and all. JF wants us (desperately) to connect this with evo psych and their claims on behavior — how does natural selection tease out the coextensive traits, especially those which come part and parcel with behavior.”
Interesting. I think my comment above this quote applies here, too. I tend to think the problem with EvoPsy is that i) we don’t know all that much about the conditions in which we evolved to be able to make fine-grained distinctions about what is selected for and what isn’t and ii) there are spandrels and probably are tons of them in the psychological realm.
Thanks for your long posts.
July 31st, 2009 at 3:57 am
@PK 37 I’m not sure what Brentano has to say about these sorts of contexts. Carnap actually uses “intension” (well, that’s how it’s translated, at least. See _Meaning and Necessity_.
@Realist, JD, anon: Fodor certainly has read a lot of EvoPsych. I suspect the gaps you mention are due to two things: 1) Some of them are very well-known, and he’s trying to say new things about what is wrong with EvoPsych and 2) He’s writing to philosophers. You might want to send him your criticisms from the perspective of a biologist.
@Keith Ellis: “No, “of course”, about it. [The existence of the soul] a matter of pure opinion, not fact, and not supported by any empirical evidence whatsoever.”
It might be worse than this. Interactionist dualism requires that there be physical events not caused by other physical events, and supposedly we should be able to see this when our science gets better. (I assume Hector and his hipster friends from Georgetown aren’t epiphenomenalists.)
July 31st, 2009 at 3:58 am
@Realist
“If we’re going to speculate on motivations, I think it’s a lot simpler than that. Philosophers like attacking evolution because they know biologists are extremely defensive about it so it’ll get them a lot of attention. There is no other reason for a non-creationist to title a paper “Against Darwinism.””
Fodor loves the polemic, especially the witty polemic.
July 31st, 2009 at 4:03 am
@ Keith Ellis
“The point is that it’s rather suspicious that the soul, not unlike God, has never yielded to any attempt at empirical verification. ”
Basil Mitchell took this up in the 50s as a way of arguing that the proposition *God exists* is verifiable (pace the positivists). Also, arguments from religious experience (and perhaps even cosmological/design arguments turn on the existence of God (or something goddish) being empirically verifiable.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:50 am
Re: Interactionist dualism requires that there be physical events not caused by other physical events, and supposedly we should be able to see this when our science gets better. (I assume Hector and his hipster friends from Georgetown aren’t epiphenomenalists.)
You assume correctly. The philosophy of mind isn’t my area (not by a long shot), but as I understand the terms, any Christian must necessarily be an interactionist dualist (it also seems to me to be the common sense position, as well as one that follows logically from the existence of free will and the human experience of the supernatural).
Re: you commit the same fallacy with regard to all your arguments against modernism (which, as someone else noted, you clumsily conflate with postmodernism)
More or less, I don’t consider the differences between modernism and postmodernism to have much importance. As long as they agree on the basic premises (that God does not exist, that miracles don’t happen, that we have the right to create our own identity and morality, that the material world is the only world there is), they are inevitably going to end up in the same place: i.e. the City of Man.
Re: In particularly, some portions of religious belief make definite claims about the nature of empirical reality. Not the least among these is the nature of human behavior and cognition. The metaphysics of the soul makes a claim about the actual physics and biology of personhood: the biology, the activity of the brain, and thus the whole person, is necessarily directed by the immaterial soul. As Dennet (IIRC) once wrote, if the soul directs the brain, then there is necessarily a physical, not merely metaphysical, relationship between the two. This is a testable claim about the nature of reality. It it a matter of empiricism.
This is true of course. WIth the caveat that the effects that the soul exerts on the brain, and on the body, may be indistinguishable (to the human eye) from the effects of what we call randomness. This is, again, not my area, but I’m intrigued by Eccles’ speculation on this matter. Anyway, I have to run but thanks for responding.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:49 am
Geez, evidently there’s an epidemic of difficult homonyms. In the world of geology: “areal” – meaning of or pertaining to area… “the areal density of feldspar in the XYZ physiographic province” and “aerial” – from the air… “an aerial survey of XYZ physiographic province was conducted”. Pronounced exactly the same. Luckily, once you’ve got the distinction down, it’s easy to tell what is meant from context.