Rhapsodic Evolution: Essay on Exaptation and Evolutionary Pluralism

Since formulating the theory of punctuated equilibria in 1972, a group of prominent evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and paleontologists have contributed towards a significant reinterpretation of the neo-Darwinian image of evolution that had consolidated during the second half of the twentieth century. We believe a research program, which we might define as "evolutionary pluralism" or "post-Darwinism," has been outlined, one that is centered on the discovery of the complexity and multiplicity of elements that work together to produce changes in our evolutionary systems. We are talking about a three-dimensional multiplicity: a multiplicity of rhythms in evolution (i.e., the theory of punctuated equilibria); a multiplicity of evolutionary units and levels (i.e., the hierarchical theory of evolution); and a multiplicity of factors and causes in evolution (i.e., the concept of exaptation). Although the reductionistic and deterministic view of natural history interprets the intelligence of evolution as a panoptic and executory rationality, evolutionary pluralism, going back to the original flexibility of the Darwinian opus, sees in the intelligence of evolution an ingenious m tis, an imperfect but very creative, craftsmanlike cleverness. The new metaphors of change introduced by evolutionary pluralism and the consequent criticism of the adaptational paradigm offer some very interesting spin-offs for the study of evolutionary systems in widely differing fields, from theoretical economics to the cognitive sciences. I propose a particular hypothesis concerning the possibility and usefulness of expanding the concept of exaptation into a general theory of developmental processes, both in biology as well as in the cognitive sciences.     

Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge

Several authors have recently endorsed the thesis that there is what has been called pragmatic encroachment on knowledge??in other words, that two people who are in the same situation with respect to truth-related factors may differ in whether they know something, due to a difference in their practical circumstances. This paper aims not to defend this thesis, but to explore how it could be true. What I aim to do, is to show how practical factors could play a role in defeating knowledge by defeating epistemic rationality??the very kind of rationality that is entailed by knowledge, and in which Pascalian considerations do not play any role??even though epistemic rationality consists in having adequate evidence.     

SOCIOLOGISM IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE*

In a nutshell, the present essay claims this: First, the classical problem of knowledge has recently shifted from, How do I know? to, How do we know?–from psychology to sociology. As a phenomenological matter this is a great improvement, as a solution to the problem of rationality it is erroneous and immoral. The problem, (Why) should I act, believe, etc., this or that? is answered: You should do so on the authority of your reason. But change the problem of rationality in accord with the change in the problem of knowledge, and ask, (Why) should we–rather than I–act or believe as we do? and the answer is clear: We should act and believe as we do, because our society is as it is, and should be as it is. This is clearly the same as, we should because we should. Not very enlightening. Sociologism appears as the authoritarian solution to the problem of rationality in works of Polanyi and Kuhn; a variant of it appears as a liberal theory in the studies of Popper and his former students who, however, do not offer any positive theory of what to believe or do; rather, they offer a negative theory of what to reject. They view this as a better solution to the problem of rationality, if not even a better formulation of it (not what and why should I/we etc., but what and why should I/we not etc.).     

Structural Rationality and the Property of Coherence

What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems.     

Instrumentally Rational Myopic Planning

Abstract

I challenge the view that, in cases where time for deliberation is not an issue, instrumental rationality precludes myopic planning. I show where there is room for instrumentally rational myopic planning, and then argue that such planning is possible not only in theory, it is something human beings can and do engage in. The possibility of such planning has, however, been disregarded, and this disregard has skewed related debates concerning instrumental rationality.     

Rationality ideals and mentality

Mackenzie, this journal, this issue, convincingly shows that in certain dialogue games (commitment games) there are procedural restrictions similar to those that I impose on rationality idealizations. But, whereas my rationality analysis is set in the context of belief games, commitment games do not postulate beliefs. Is this significant? I suggest that mackenzie thinks that it is. There follow discussions of Psychologism and Behaviourism.     

Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first‐order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher‐order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.     

Moral Blindness and Moral Responsibility: What can we learn from Rhoda Penmark?

ABSTRACT The cases devised by moral philosophers are often abstract and sterile to the point of precluding the most important function of emotion in our dealings with real people in real situations. Far from thinking that morality is exclusively a matter of rational assessment of the morally relevant features of a situation, I believe that rationality has little if anything to do with moral conduct, and I hope to illustrate this through a consideration of what precisely is amiss with Miss Penmark of The Bad Seed. [1]     

Enkratic Agency

An enkratic agent is someone who intends to do A because she believes she should do A. Being enkratic is usually understood as something rationality requires of you. However, we must distinguish between different conceptions of enkratic rationality. According to a fairly common view, enkratic rationality is solely a normative requirement on agency: it tells us how agents should think and act. However, I shall argue that this normativist conception of enkratic rationality faces serious difficulties: it makes it a mystery how an agent's thinking and acting can be guided by the enkratic requirement, which, as I shall further argue, is something that an adequate conception of enkratic rationality must be able to explain. This, I suggest, motivates exploring a different account of enkratic rationality. On this view, enkratic rationality is primarily a constitutive requirement on agency: it is a standard internal to agency, i.e., a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agential powers well.     

Happiness,Rationality, Autonomy and the Good Life

The paper starts with a general discussion of the concepts of happiness and the good life. I argue that there is a conceptual core of happiness which has to do with one’s life as a whole. I discuss affective and attitude or life satisfaction views of happiness and indicate problems faced by those views. I introduce my own view, the life plan view, which sees happiness as the ongoing realizing of global desires of the person. I argue that on such a view one’s life could be happy without a high level of rationality or a high level of autonomy; such rationality and autonomy are not built into the concept of happiness. So while happiness is a final value, and good for the person, it is not the only final value. Rationality and autonomy are also final values and, where they exist, are good as ends for the person, part of the good life.     

Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative.     

Grief's Rationality,Backward and Forward

Grief is our emotional response to the deaths of intimates, and so like many other emotional conditions, it can be appraised in terms of its rationality. A philosophical account of grief's rationality should satisfy a contingency constraint, wherein grief is neither intrinsically rational nor intrinsically irrational. Here I provide an account of grief and its rationality that satisfies this constraint, while also being faithful to the phenomenology of grief experience. I begin by arguing against the best known account of grief's rationality, Gustafson's strategic or forward‐looking account, according to which the practical rationality of grief depends on the internal coherence of the component attitudes that explain the behaviors caused by grief, and more exactly, on how these attitudes enable the individual to realize states of affairs that she desires. While I do not deny that episodes of grief can be appraised in terms of their strategic rationality, I deny that strategic rationality is the essential or fundamental basis on which grief's rationality should be appraised. In contrast, the heart of grief's rationality is backward‐looking. That is, what primarily makes an episode of grief rational qua grief is the fittingness of the attitudes individuals take toward the experience of a lost relationship, attitudes which in turn generate the desires and behaviors that constitute bereavement. Grief thus derives its essential rationality from the objects it responds to, not from the attitudes causally downstream from that response, and is necessarily irrational when the behaviors that constitute an individual's grieving are inappropriate to the object of that grief. So while the strategic rationality of an episode of grief contributes to whether it is on the whole rational, no episode of grief can be rational unless the actions that constitute grieving accurately gauge the change in a person's normative situation wrought by the loss of her relationship with the deceased.     

Extending the Dynamics of Reason

What I call the dynamics of reason is a post-Kuhnian approach to the history and philosophy of science articulating a relativized and historicized version of the Kantian conception of the rationality and objectivity of the modern physical sciences. I here discuss two extensions of this approach. I argue that, although the relativized standards of rationality in question change over time, the particular way in which they do this still preserves the trans-historical rationality of the entire process. I also make a beginning in extending my historical narrative from purely intellectual history (both philosophical and scientific) to the wider cultural context.     

Weakness of Will

My chief aim is to explain how someone can act freely against her own best judgment. But I also have a second aim: to defend a conception of practical rationality according to which someone cannot do something freely if she believes it would be better to do something else. These aims may appear incompatible. But I argue that practical reason has the capacity to undermine itself in such a way that it produces reasons for behaving irrationally. Weakness of will is possible because it is possible to conclude that one has sufficient reason to reject the verdicts of one's own reason.     

Personhood and community

Abstract

Davidson develops an argument that establishes the most basic set-up for rationality. The minimal set-up is a triangle formed by two subjects and an object. Each of the two subjects occupies one of the three angles and the third angle is occupied by a subject matter – that about which the two subjects are in communication with one another. I extend Davidson’s argument somewhat and show how an entire pluralistic community is required for individuals to develop most fully as rational creatures. I do this by showing how the basic conditions for rationality set out by Davidson would start to crumble in conditions such as those set out in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ideal, as opposed to the minimal, set-up for rationality is not a triangle, but a pluralistic network of subjects. And indeed, the ideal conditions for rationality are to a large extent just that because they allow for the full implementation of Davidson’s minimal set-up.     

What’s wrong with the evolutionary argument against naturalism?

Alvin Plantinga has argued that evolutionary naturalism (the idea that God does not tinker with evolution) undermines its own rationality. Natural selection is concerned with survival and reproduction, and false beliefs conjoined with complementary motivational drives could serve the same aims as true beliefs. Thus, argues Plantinga, if we believe we evolved naturally, we should not think our beliefs are, on average, likely to be true, including our beliefs in evolution and naturalism. I argue herein that our cognitive faculties are less reliable than we often take them to be, that it is theism which has difficulty explaining the nature of our cognition, that much of our knowledge is not passed through biological evolution but learned and transferred through culture, and that the unreliability of our cognition helps explain the usefulness of science.     

Practical Reasons, Practical Rationality, Practical Wisdom

There are a number of proposals as to exactly how reasons, ends and rationality are related. It is often thought that practical reasons can be analyzed in terms of practical rationality, which, in turn, has something to do with the pursuit of ends. I want to argue against the conceptual priority of rationality and the pursuit of ends, and in favor of the conceptual priority of reasons. This case comes in two parts. I first argue for a new conception of ends by which all ends are had under the guise of reasons. I then articulate a sense of rationality, procedural rationality, that is connected with the pursuit of ends so conceived, where one is rational to the extent that one is motivated to act in accordance with reasons as they appear to be. Unfortunately, these conceptions of ends and procedural rationality are inadequate for building an account of practical reasons, though I try to explain why it is that the rational pursuit of ends generates intuitive but misleading accounts of genuine normative reasons. The crux of the problem is an insensitivity to an is-seems distinction, where procedural rationality concerns reasons as they appear, and what we are after is a substantive sense of rationality that concerns reasons as they are. Based on these distinct senses of rationality, and some disambiguation of what it is to have a reason, I offer a critique of internalist analyses of one’s reasons in terms of the motivational states of one’s ideal, procedurally rational self, and I offer an alternative analysis of one’s practical reasons in terms of practical wisdom that overcomes objections to related reasons externalist views. The resulting theory is roughly Humean about procedural rationality and roughly Aristotelian about reasons, capturing the core truths of both camps.

The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited

In this essay I distinguish four different modes of feminist critique of reason. Discussing the work of authors such as Keller, Irigaray, and Butler, I point out that the issue of masculine connotations has been addressed with regard to different concepts—or at least different aspects—of reason. In view of a tendency to overdraw the objections, I suggest to reformulate the feminist critique of reason. I also argue that a rediscovery of those philosophical concepts of reason that do not restrict this term to instrumental rationality might be useful for this purpose.     

The Enkratic Requirement

Abstract: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons.     

心理学对经济学的涉入——从理性自利到社会偏好的决策框架

理性认知能力与社会偏好存在紧密的关联。文章简要回顾了经济决策理论从理性模型到有限理性模型和社会偏好模型的发展进程,论述了人们理性的局限性及其根源,并进一步探讨理性认知能力与社会偏好的关系。对人类以及灵长目动物的研究显示,有限理性可能是由根源于演化的适应性机制所导致。人类不公平厌恶的起源、个体公平能力的发展规律和表征公平的大脑结构上的证据表明,理性认知能力能让人更好地抑制自私性,实现更高层次的公平。