Jerry Fodor

The crucial sentence in Peter Godfrey-Smith’s review of our book, What Darwin Got Wrong, is: ‘If one [but not the other of two linked traits] is causing increased reproductive success, it is being selected for, in the sense that matters to evolutionary theory’ (LRB, 8 July). A number of other reviewers of the book have made much the same suggestion, but it won’t do. The theory of natural selection...

A perceptible flurry in the dovecote. Here are some replies to my critics. It seems to me that Simon Blackburn has comprehensively missed the point (Letters, 1 November). He takes the problem I raised to be epistemological: ‘If two traits occur together, how do we know which was “selected" for?’ But I don’t do epistemology, and that isn’t what I’m worried about (nor, by the way, is it what...

As far as I can tell, Richard Rorty (LRB, 16 March) is seriously confused. it’s a leitmotif of his piece that ‘understanding is always of objects under a description,’ a principle from which he apparently thinks it follows that there’s never a way of getting ‘behind’ the description to the object that you’re trying to understand. I doubt that does follow, but bother the inference –...

My Rutgers colleague, Benjamin Martin Bly, seems not to grasp that there is a difference between, on the one hand, trying to find out ‘the way the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our brains’ or ‘the basis of cognition when it depends on a subtle interplay among brain regions’ and, on the other hand, making brain maps of what lights up where when one thinks about teapots (Letters,...