[b]Jerry Fodor
Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.[/b]
My guess: For different reasons.
Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.
Or at least up to their necks?
On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.
Not unlike everyone else.
The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.
Okay, but is that banal enough?
No doubt, intuitions deserve respect…but I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.
So, what’s your intuition tell you about this?
Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.
Things that only intellectuals pedants say.