This Really Matters. What Do You Think Should be Taught to Your Children?

I trust we are all keeping up at  the back? 

Fodor refutes Fodor's critique of natural selection?

David Wallace (Oxford), following a link from my earlier post, points out this passage from Fodor's critique of Putnam's attack on cognitive science:

I don’t, myself, think that cognitive science is more in need of philosophical defence than is, say, ornithology. The warrant of the enterprise, in both cases, is not that the questions pursued are ‘well-defined’, but the truths that are discovered in the course of pursuing them. For someone who repeatedly claims to be a pragmatist, Putnam is strangely insensitive to the methodological truism that success is what justifies. If he really wants to mount a respectable attack on cognitive science (or ornithology for that matter) he has to show that the truths it claims to have discovered are spurious, or that they can be explained just as well without appeals to representational mental states and processes. That, however, would be hard work, and Putnam doesn’t even try. All of his arguments are a priori.

Dr. Wallace comments: 

All of which seems exactly right to me – but it could apply, mutatis mutandis, to Fodor’s own critique of natural selection, and indeed it’s pretty much what many of the commentators on Fodor have indeed been saying. As Fodor himself says in the same LRB critique, “what a strange business philosophy is”.

Leiter h/t again