Evolutionary Psychology and the Propositional-attitudes by Alex Walter

Author:Alex Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Why Proximate Mechanisms Matter

The critical criterion of a valid evolutionary explanation of behavior is that it has to distinguish a just-so hypothesis from a justified explanation. Sociobiology failed to do this because its practitioners stipulated that the concept of adaptation guaranteed that all evolutionary outcomes were adaptive. In their criticism of sociobiology, evolutionary psychologists were right to bring the ancestral history of proximate mechanisms back into focus. Adaptations must be linked to the circumstances of their ancestral history; yet, there is no guarantee that yesterday’s adaptation is not today’s evolutionary dead end. ‘As if’ intentionality is no better than sociobiological fitness-maximizing stipulations that guarantee reproductive success because they provide the same type of pseudo-guarantees that behavior follows an adaptive program whether that program is currently adaptive or not. The model is infinitely malleable and can pretend to explain any and all outcomes. Hence, the explanatory problem is clear: why substitute population genetics in the form of IPM psychology for a theory of proximate mechanisms?

In addition, information processing models simply are not a good candidate for a theory of evolutionary proximate mechanisms because of their ontological commitment to a dualism of mind over brain (Churchland 1986; Uttal 2004). There is no software analog that runs on top of the wetware of the brain. Despite the fact that our species engages in linguistic behavior, the brain accomplishes its work, both linguistic and non-linguistic, via a physical, non-sentential, electrochemical system, possibly in accordance with mathematical descriptions supplied by tensor network analysis as suggested by neurobiological materialists such as Churchland (1989, 2007) or Grossberg (1988).

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