There seems to be a lot of venom against Dawkins. Some of his work is superb, 'The Ancestors Tale' for instance. I also read 'The God Delusion', and thought it was a bit weak. I think that a lot of the people arguing against him have probably never read his work, and are arguing against whatever constructs of him they have encountered.
The 'Ancestor's Tale' is in my opinion a fascinating explanation of evolutionary history. It is strange that he is attacked so much. Nobody attacked Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time' for not having a class analysis.
Devrim
, this thread is about Dawkins and as such it's kinda fair for him to vent about Dawkins shit politics.
Can comment on articles and discussions
but evolutionary psychology doesn't propose to work by using a time-machine to go back to 10,000 years ago, and neither does cognitive science.
but let me go back to the article by Thomas Martin. First of all, "cognitive science" came into being in the '60s and '70s as an interdisciplinary cooperation of people from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, pscychology, linguistics, etc. To suppose that it all flows from the brains of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is ridiculous. the cooperation of some philosophers in this endeavor derived from what i called the "naturalist turn" in philosophy, which meant that philosophers became more interested in finding out what the actual cognitive capacities and knowledge methods of humans are, rather than trying to develop epistemology (study of what constitutes knowledge) from principles that ignore actual human capacities.
this has not been the only "trend" in philosophy over the past 30 years. there's also been an anti-realist trend, which takes a variety of forms, such as those influenced by the linguistic idealism of Sausure, the various French relativists and anti-realists like Derida, and in its more American form, you have anti-realist pragmatists like Rorty and Putnam. There is no direct relationship between these "naturalist" and "anti-realist" trends, tho some may try to use cognitive science premises for anti-realist conclusions, i suppose.
Writes Martin:
This completely trivializes cognitive science. Take the second statement. Let's say i ask you a series of 5,000 questions. At the end i will have assayed some thousands of beliefs you possess. But at no time are you consciously thinking all of these thousands of beliefs. Those beliefs still exist, they're stuck in some way in your brain, but you're not conscious of them. This is one of the senses in which much of your "thought" isn't "conscious." But this has been known for a very long time, and "cognitive science" wasn't needed to reveal it.
More:
This is all really quite silly. Inference is one of the sources of knowledge. Philosophers usually talk about "reason" in reference to reasonings, inference as a way of finding out things. Now it is true that we can investigate the actual reasoning capacity of humans and we can try to determine how accurate it is. For example, one of the studies of the psychology of reasoning has shown that there is a certain inferential strategy that humans are inclined to use that will often lead them into error. This is called the Exemplar Strategy. So, if you encounter a new thing that you regard as an X -- a cat or whatever,
and you want to know, How likely is it that X has trait F? What you may do is try to think of a "typical" X, and if your conception of a typical F has that property, you'll infer that this new example is probably F. This is a method that works in a very rough way when dealing with natural flora and fauna, plants and animals and minerals. That's probably where it comes from, from an evolutionary point of view, but it is notorious that when this method is applied to complicated social realities, it leads to the kind of error called "stereotyped" thinking, for example, it can support racist thinking.
Now, ask yourself the question, how do the psychologists know that this inferential method fails sometimes? They know because they know what it is to make a valid inference. A valid inference method is one that doesn't tend to lead you astray, wondering from true premises to false conclusions. That is a basic principle of "reason" and nothing in "cognitive science" or talk about the "embodied mind" upends that.
The bit about the world being as we perceive it to be is an anti-realist tidbit that Martin seems to throw in gratuitously. He's confusing two different issues: How do we acquire knowledge? and, does the physical world that appears to us in our perceptual experience exist or not?
We can be led astray, as my previous example shows, but we also have the methods to find that out. It suggests Martin doesn't have a good grasp on what "reason" is.
t.