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On Several Misuses of Sober’s Selection for/Selection of Distinction

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Abstract

Teleological Theories of mental representation are probably the most promising naturalistic accounts of intentionality. However, it is widely known that these theories suffer from a major objection: the Indeterminacy Problem. The most common reply to this problem employs the Target of Selection Argument, which is based on Sober’s distinction between selection for and selection of. Unfortunately, some years ago the Target of Selection Argument came into serious attack in a famous paper by Goode and Griffiths. Since then, the question of the validity of the Target of Selection Argument in the context of the Indeterminacy Problem has remained largely untouched. In this essay, I argue that both the Target of Selection Argument and Goode and Griffiths’ criticisms to it misuse Sober’s analysis in important respects.

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Notes

  1. The target of some teleological theories is still much broader than that; they try to account for all kinds of representation (including, for instance, animal communication). See Millikan (1984, 2004, 2005) and Stegmann (2009).

  2. Of course, the represented state does no need to be external to the organism; for instance, one might have a mental representation of tissue damage in his leg. Nonetheless, I am going to assume that representational mechanisms only represent external states of affairs to keep the discussion as simple as possible and because this is in fact what happens in the main case exposed here. Nothing essential hinges on that assumption.

  3. In some theories, what is relevant is not the function of the representational system, but the function of the representation itself (Papineau 1987, 1993, 1998). For present purposes, I am going to ignore these distinctions.

  4. More precisely, R correlates with S iff P(S|R) > P(S).

  5. Let me mention just two: first, it is able to explain how misrepresentations are possible. Roughly, a representation is false iff the representational mechanism fails to fulfil its function. Secondly, it can explain why a mental state can represent S even if most of the time the representation is false (as happens very often in the biological world). According to TT, for R to represent S it suffices if R correlates with S usually enough for the representational system to be selected for. Other accounts (such as Causal Theories, Stampe (1977); Dretske (1981)) fail to satisfy both desiderata.

  6. As it is common in the literature on this topic, I am going to assume throughout the paper that frogs only prey on flies. Even though it is empirically false (Neander 2006; Nishikawa 2000), this simplification is going to be very helpful in order to keep the example as simple as possible.

  7. One might doubt that science and common sense warrant such a single and specific content attribution. That is, one could argue that the teleological theorist should just bit the bullet and claim that frogs represent something as indeterminate as there is a moving black thing, there is a fly, there is frog food,… The problem with this suggestion is that if we accept such indeterminacy at this stage, it is going to be very difficult to prevent similar indeterminacies in more complex organisms, where we do have the intuition that there is a more specific content (Price 2001). In any event, in this paper I discuss the arguments from those who think that Teleosemantics must yield a unique and specific content. Consequently, I am going to assume that the Indeterminacy Problem is an important objection against Teleological Theories.

  8. I will explain this distinction in more detail below.

  9. Some readers may have noticed the strong similitudes with Fodor’s Asymmetric Dependence Theory. However, a crucial respect in which both accounts differ is in the fact that Fodor does not appeal to Sober’s distinction in order to defend his counterfactual condition (see Fodor 2010). In the last part of the paper, I will argue that, despite this important distinction, my arguments will probably also apply to Fodor’s Asymmetric Dependence Theory.

  10. Millikan also provides a different (and brief) argument against the Indeterminacy Problem in Millikan (2004, p. 85) .

  11. It must be said that Price (2001, ch 2–3) explicitly rejects the TSA. Nevertheless, she implicitly uses it when spelling out the abstractness condition.

  12. Goode and Griffiths’ silence about this point suggests that they were not aware of it.

  13. This result might lead some people to think that this is not a reductio of TSA, but rather of the whole project of accounting for intentionality using an evolutionary framework. I think that is too rush a conclusion. There are good reasons for thinking this project is worth pursuing (see Sect. 1). Furthermore, in the last part of the paper I am going to argue that there is something specifically wrong about TSA.

  14. More precisely, since causal relations hold between facts/events (or states of affairs), the idea is that there is a causal relationship between the fact that the ball is small and the fact that the small red balls end at the bottom level that lacks between the fact that the ball is red and the fact that a small red balls end at the bottom level.

  15. Of course, that does not exclude the possibility of there being some other way of telling whether there has been selection for properties at different levels. What this argument shows is that properties at different levels cannot be compared directly; redness should be compared with blueness and orangeness, and colour should be compared with size.

  16. Notice that one could keep the properties of the fly fixed and change the properties of environment (or natural selection) so as to examine which of the latter properties were causally responsible for the same outcome. What I think is illegitimate is to alter some of the alleged causal properties (flies, environment or natural selection) and also change the outcome. I want to thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

  17. One might object that also in Sober’s original example there is a property of the outcome that is altered, since in the counterfactual situation the balls at the bottom are small but not red. However, there are two important features that distinguish Sober’s example from the TSA. First, in the toy we are considering whether color or smallness caused the selection of this set of balls. So the relevant feature that needs to be kept fixed is the set of balls selected, and this is not altered in the counterfactual situation. In contrast, in the frog example, we want to know which feature of the environment (flies, black shadows, etc…) is responsible for the representational system. My argument is that the TSA forces us to change the representational system, and hence it alters the outcome in relevant aspects. Secondly, notice that since we are considering cases where the small balls are not red, ex hypothesi the balls selected for being small are not going to be red. In contrast, in the frog example we alter a property of the fly (flies do not cast black shadows any more) and as a consequence there are important changes in the representational system. Both reasons underpin the claim that while in Sober’s case the outcome is the same (in relevant aspects), when we use the TSA in the context of representational system, we must change the outcome (in relevant aspects).

  18. Even if most of the discussion has revolved around the property being fitness-enhancing (due to Goode and Griffiths paper), this is probably not the best example, since what kind of property fitness is is a much disputed issue in philosophy of biology (Rosenberg and Bouchard 2008). As a consequence of this uncertainty, it is hard to assess whether the argument provided in this paper is a knockdown objection against the TSA applied to the property being fitness-enhancing. Nonetheless, the fact that this argument works very well with the rest of properties that generate the Indeterminacy Problem and also with a certain interpretation of ‘fitness’ strongly suggests that the objection presented here has a general character.

  19. The argument offered in Sect. 4.2 could also be developed as an objection to Fodor’s Asymmetric Dependence Theory (Fodor 1990). Fodor’s approach is based on the idea that the law that links black specks to the frog’s mental states is asymmetrically dependent on the law that links flies to the frog’s mental states; in other words, it assumes that the latter nomological connection is more robust than the former. However, if the argument presented here is sound, asymmetric dependence cannot justify attributions of content, for the very same reasons TSA fails. Consequently, Fodor’s theory will also fall short of solving the Indeterminacy Problem. Unfortunately, developing these ideas would require a long discussion that exceeds the limited scope and extension of this essay.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Pineda, Miguel Ángel Sebastian, Manolo Martinez and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and incisive criticisms. This work was supported by the scholarhsip BES-2008-005255 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN), the Research Projects ‘The Naturalization of Subjectivity’ (ref. FFI2010-15717), ‘Modal Aspects of Materialist Realism’ (ref. HUM2007-61108) and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056.

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    Marc Artiga

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Artiga, M. On Several Misuses of Sober’s Selection for/Selection of Distinction. Topoi 30, 181–193 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-011-9113-8

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