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Deconstructing Dennett's Darwin
Author(s) -
FODOR JERRY
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0017.1996.tb00045.x
Subject(s) - intentionality , darwin (adl) , darwinism , teleology , epistemology , naturalism , philosophy , cognitive science , psychology , computer science , software engineering
Daniel Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea , offers a naturalistic teleology and a theory of the intentionality of the mental. Both are grounded in a neo‐Darwinian account of evolutionary adaptation. I argue that Dennett's empirical assumptions about the evolution of psychological phenotypes may well be unwarranted; and that, in any event, the intentionality of minds is quite different from, and not reducible to, the intensionality of selection.