Is "formalism" back in fashion?

Fodor has boggled me for years. He's obviously intelligent and has smart things to say about cognition, or at least gadfly-ish things to say about it. So it shocks me how ignorant he seems of other areas of science.

I had my first dose of Fodor when he wrote an essay — a book review, I think it was — making some incredibly ignorant and illogical claims in the "philosophy of mind" department. As I recall, he was asserting that "consciousness" could be some new kind of "fundamental physical law" in and of itself; in the process, he revealed that he didn't know what the word fundamental means in the physical sciences, and he completely mangled the notion of emergent properties before demeaning the whole field of statistical physics. If you don't know physics, that's fine, but I'll thank you not to expound on what you don't know!

Jerry Fodor: the philosopher who builds a strawman, swings at it and misses.

I honestly don't know how anyone could read the whole article. The construction was so haphazard I didn't know what was going on half the time and the other half of the time was full of "wtf?" thoughts running through my head. Someone needs teach her how to write coherent thoughts.

Fodor's a weird one, it's true. He's done some serious work showing how the cognitivist view of the mind is a bit shaky and his work on connectionism is important, but he's also at least partly to blame for the messiness of the concept of modularity in cognitive psychology. I actually had no idea he was bent on debunking adaptationism too.

I think you misunderstand Fodor. He isn't disagreeing about any of the specific events that may have occured during evolution only how to charachterize them.

For instance consider the point you made in the earlier post about Polar bears evolving to be white. Fodor was not disputing any specific facts about how Polar bears got to be the way they are now. That is he would accept the same general conclusions about which polar bears died when, e.g., he would certainly agree that during the relevant time period bears whose coats were less white were more likely to die without offspring.

What Fodor is objecting to is phrasing the claim in terms of causation by a particular trait. Sure, polar bears whose coats were less white were less likely to survive but so too were those whose coats were blite where blite means "is white if near the poles and black if near the equator." Since all polar bears live near the poles this property correlates just as strongly with increased polar bear survival.

Fodor's complaint is that the real reason that the Polar bears coat is white is the result of a specific series of births, deaths and reproduction events through the history of polar bears. He isn't disputing any of the underlying probabilities of these events only our choice to describe this complex historical account as the polar bear's coat being selected to be white.

To put the issue slightly more technically the problem is that if we say, "this species was selected for property X," X occurs in an opaque context. That is it isn't the same to say that "Giraffes were selected to have long necks so they could eat high leaves," and "Giraffes were selected to look pretty to me," even if I think only those Giraffes with long necks look pretty. He would argue that science should be in the buisness only of saying what actually did happen (these animals died those ones survived) and not in offering just so stories from this data that make us feel good.

In other words his point is that it's a mistake to infer too much intentionality to natural events. Shit happens out there in the world and the real cause of events is to be found at the sub-atomic level. Polar bears have white coats simply because that's what QM (or it's successor) would predict given perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. Nature doesn't intend to select Polar bears for whiteness or to have sharp teeth it's just that in such a circumstance our complete physical laws would predict that such animals would arise.

Let me offer a simplified explanation of what I think Fodor is trying to say.

When you respond to Fodor's point about the polar bear by saying that obviously polar bears evolved to "match the color of their environment' because "having a white coat in a dark environment wouldn't be an advantage." I take it that Fodor would have two problems with this.

1) You are now talking about a poorly defined hypothetical. Obviously it's not true that in every case a white coat in a dark enviornment would be bad. Maybe if polar bears were living in a dark enviornment the desire to show off to mates would 'select' for white coats. Importantly, however, we aren't arguing any longer about what actually happened but about what would have happened had things been different in a completely underspecified way. Fodor would say that science should be in the business of saying what actually happens and (maybe) what would happen in fairly precise alternatives (if I drop a ball...) but surely what is the most reasonable alternative history where polar bears didn't live in a white environment isn't a scientific question.

2) What do you mean by advantage? If you mean "more likely to produce descendants who survive" the statement of natural selection is a tautological consequence of the heritability of traits. If you don't what do you mean?

TruePath; Thank you for the comments. From what I can tell Fodor has taken some arguments against "hyper-adaptationism" to a new extreme, and from what I've read so far he seems to doubt the ability of natural selection to do much of anything.

As for the polar bear example, I think he was baiting readers to come up with a "just-so story" that he could then attack. The fact that polar bears have white fur and black skin can certainly be accounted for by natural selection (they are adaptations to the environment), and I don't think saying so infers some sort of intentionality on the part of the animal, "Mother Nature," or anything else.

It seems that Fodor's main objection to natural selection stems from his distaste for pop-evolutionary psychology, a dislike that we actually share. What Fodor does, though, is make something of a caricature of evolutionary theory based upon this, suggesting that natural selection is the only thing that matters. He can't quite seem to grasp that there are mechanisms (like changes in development) that result in new variations for natural selection to act upon, both of which are required for evolution. Indeed, as Fodor states, he sees natural selection as a conservative process (not a creative one), and therefore new body types have to arise by some other mechanism. This underlies the minor "formalist" revival in which natural selection is denied as a driving force of evolution, the "true" source of variation and change often arising through development. What these ideas fail to account for, however, is that whatever mutations or developmental changes might produce are then acted on by natural selection (as well as related mechanisms like kin and sexual selection), so pools of variation are only one part of the story.

My main objection to Fodor, then, is that he is ignoring the importance of natural selection and is putting his money on evo-devo. Studies of development are important to understanding evolutionary change, but whatever novelty or variation might be produced is then at the mercy of life's contingencies.

Sure, polar bears whose coats were less white were less likely to survive but so too were those whose coats were blite where blite means "is white if near the poles and black if near the equator."

But there is no such thing! Does Fodor know anything about genetics?

Now, of course, if we brush his ignorance aside, we can still read this as meaning that "white" need not be the result of a single allele of a single gene. This is correct, and it is not news, so I don't know why he mentions it.

In other words his point is that it's a mistake to infer too much intentionality to natural events.

Please. No scientist ascribes any intentionality to any natural event.

Polar bears have white coats simply because that's what QM (or it's successor) would predict given perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. Nature doesn't intend to select Polar bears for whiteness or to have sharp teeth it's just that in such a circumstance our complete physical laws would predict that such animals would arise.

Nobody has claimed that natural selection is a separate natural law like those of thermodynamics. Of course it isn't, and of course this isn't news.

Maybe if polar bears were living in a dark enviornment the desire to show off to mates would 'select' for white coats.

Yes, but, so far at least, we don't need this assumption to explain anything. Occam's Razor.

What do you mean by advantage? If you mean "more likely to produce descendants who survive" the statement of natural selection is a tautological consequence of the heritability of traits.

Almost. Which ones are more likely to produce surviving fertile descendants depends on the environment. This breaks the circle.

"Stuart Newman's "High Tea"
Before Genetic Programs There were DPMs"
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0803/S00460.htm