Jerry Fodor,
"The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism"


A critical review (for the London Review of Books) of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works and Henry Plotkin's Evolution in Mind that sketches out with economy and wit a helpful critical frame for understanding the latest craze in "cognitive science" and -- incidentally and not too obtrusively -- for understanding something about Fodor's own "nativism". None of this is from a Peircean perspective, but Fodor is a master of "state of the art" sketches as perceived from the mainstream of U.S. academic philosophy. It might also provide some hints at strategy for the critical assessment of other varieties of extended Darwinism that are currently flourishing, such as e.g. in the recent popular writing of Edward O. Wilson or the increasingly numerous and diverse applications of "genetic algorithms" in computational modeling of cognition.

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Modified by B.U. June 27, 2011, last on August 6, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.

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