ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, 9(1), 47-96
Copyright 1997, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. |
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Evolutionary Theory Developing: The
Problem(s) With Darwin's Dangerous Idea
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Rod Swenson |
Center for the Ecological Study of Perception
and Action |
University of Connecticut |
Daniel Dennett's book, Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, is presented as an historical account and
explication of evolutionary theory, and a demonstration of how
Darwin's "dangerous idea" provides an explanation of
the psychological or epistemic dimension of the world (or of
"mind" in nature). Its real agenda is to present Dennett's
own theory of the origin of "mind" in nature, a kind
of computer age, neo-Pythagoreanism, which seeks to legitimize
the claims of Artificial Intelligence by locating the source
of all agency, meaning, or "mind", in an otherwise
"dead" world of physics in algorithms. This approach
continues the dominant tradition in modern science of radically
separating the psychological and physical into two incommensurable
parts, and it is this, the paradigmatic dualism at its core,
and the erroneous and outdated empirical assumptions on which
it is based, that are the book's undoing. By correcting these
assumptions a principled basis is provided for grounding a commensurable
theory that dissolves the anomalies inherent in such Cartesian
accounts. |
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INTRODUCTION
Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea purports to present
an authoritative history and explication of evolutionary theory,
to vindicate Darwinian theory by showing the failure of
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