2. SELECTIVELY LIMITED GALILEANISM

     Because only a small minority of scientists, philosophers, and their followers seems prepared to entertain reductionistic explanations of all human behavior, including the mental and the cultural, the result has been widespread, selectively limited Galileanism, whereby the power of Galilean explanation is acknowledged and used in all areas except human mental, social, and cultural phenomena -- which are declared either out-of-bounds or intractable via various imaginative rationales.

     The prevailing view is anti-Galilean: that mind itself explains human social behavior and culture, and that purely physical explanations fail to account for the human mind. The mind of God may be called upon to explain that -- and itself.

     One purportedly Galilean view presumes that mind and its cultures evolved just as other behaviors have (so far, so good), but it puts aside the question of how this happened, and proceeds to explain complex human events using the same mind-first standpoint (treating mental states rather than brain functions as explanatorily fundamental) as do anti-Galileans. This "non-reducing reduction" takes it for granted that whatever biological process may have produced the human mind had the decency to make it conform to whatever our common-sense conception of it (our folk psychology) would turn out to be!

     Another claimant to Galileanism (which we'll examine further in a moment) admits that mind and culture are produced by a biological mechanism that arose through the evolutionary process, but holds that this mechanism wasn't designed for its present-day role. It evolved as a general-purpose apparatus for flexibly responding to the environment, and it just happened to be suitable for developing and communicating human thought. Mind and culture, then, stand on the foundation of evolutionary biological process, but they are not part of it.

     Because the theoretical reduction of everything possible is the aim of Galileanism, a true Galilean is one who accepts no non-physical explanations at all about the furniture and events of the physical world (unless the entire Galilean enterprise has failed, in which case it would be a mistake to remain one). A Galilean may not posit for any phenomenon a cause that lacks a fully materialistic pedigree.

     Any claim, then, that some cause is independent of physical antecedents automatically renders the theory non-Galilean -- so the notion of "limited" Galileanism turns out to be oxymoronic. That leaves us in need of a term to replace 'selectively limited Galileanism', which turns out to describe either "nearly Galilean" or "deceptively similar to Galilean" views. I'll use 'pseudo-Galileanism' and its obvious derivatives to stand for any view that is "closely or deceptively similar" (in the words of my dictionary) to Galileanism. For emphasis, I might occasionally commit the redundancy "fully Galilean".

     It could certainly turn out that some non-Galilean explanations are correct -- but Galileans have discovered no reason to believe this will be the case. Based on the tremendous success of the Galilean project to date, they parsimoniously take the possible theoretical reduction (in principle) of all phenomena to the operation of physical laws as axiomatic -- an unverifiable but refutable a priori claim -- and accept whatever risk of error that step may entail.

     Galilean reduction of our human mental and cultural attainments seems onerous or preposterous to nearly everyone, but this isn't the place for a detailed defense of Galileanism, for my commitment to it is a point of agreement with Gibbard. Many objections to what I have to say here, however, will be anti-Galilean. I must deal directly with persistent anti-Galilean influences that confound even the most committed Galileans, but I will refer readers who require even more convincing to authors I cite who have treated the subject in depth: Dawkins, the Churchlands, Gazzaniga, and particularly Dennett (1995).

2.1 Persistent Anthropocentrism

     Perhaps there was a time when the conductivity of saltwater was considered to be simply "something saltwater does." Once we became aware that saltwater consisted of functionally distinct modules -- water molecules, sodium ions, and chloride ions -- it was natural for us to consider, from a Galilean perspective, whether the conductivity of saltwater was the result of a special functional interaction of its modules (in response to external influences).

     There has been a time -- extending to the present for most people -- when thought and judgment (as just two examples) were considered to be simply "something humans do." Once we became aware that humans consisted of functionally distinct modules -- tissues, organs, bones, teeth, etc. -- and that one organ (the brain) was implicated in thought and judgment, and that the brain was organized into modules, each functionally distinct and accounting for a particular aspect of human mental operation (a decades-old theory I'll explain momentarily that no longer, as far as I can tell, has any serious opposition), it was natural for us to consider, from a Galilean perspective, whether our thoughts and judgments were the result of special functional interactions of those modules (in response to external influences).

     Unfortunately, it is also natural for us to avoid, deny, and circumvent those considerations -- for they hold implications that diminish our importance, our specialness -- our humanity, many would contend. One reason I follow Gibbard's use of the term 'Galilean' and its cognates (rather than use 'materialist' or 'physicalist' or 'functionalist' and theirs) is that Galileo's persecution at the hands of anthropocentrists makes his name stand as a constant rebuke -- and warning -- against anthropocentrism.

     This benighted tendency has delayed the abandonment of many "self-evident" yet mistaken views that have flattered humanity: the geocentric universe, the heliocentric universe, the separate origins of men and apes, etc. It continues to prevail in the struggle against emerging Galilean explanations for human behavior, thought, and culture.

     These explanations, accompanied by impassioned outcries against persistent anthropocentrism, have been emerging dramatically for nearly 30 years. E.O. Wilson's seminal Sociobiology (1975) launched a new discipline by that name -- along with much reactionary opposition. A daughter discipline, evolutionary psychology, has corrected some errors of, and many misapprehensions about, sociobiology. Today, biologists, cognitive scientists, ethologists, paleontologists, psychologists, philosophers (notably Patricia Smith Churchland, Paul M. Churchland, and Daniel Dennett) and others have added much of value to the Galilean literature concerning mind and culture.

     If the proponents of this view often sound shrill, it's because they believe their arguments have long since rendered the opposition bankrupt -- yet opposition persists, even in their own disciplines. Dennett (1995, p. 266) quotes a pertinent lament from John Maynard Smith: "One cannot spend a lifetime working on evolutionary theory without becoming aware that most people who do not work in the field, and some who do, have a strong wish to believe that the Darwinian theory is false."

2.2 Mistaken Essentialism

     Anthropocentrism is a special case of a broader problem. We imagine that some new, essential quality has been added to us that was altogether missing from all our pre-human ancestors. When considering apparently unique human qualities, we should parsimoniously look for analogues of those qualities in our cousin species. Finding them, we should be surprised if they turn out to differ from their human counterparts in kind rather than in degree.

     I'm not arguing against Aristotelian essentialism, per se, as a doctrine identifying the essential qualities of things. In fact, I depend entirely on the claim that reflexive functionality (to be explained anon) is an essential property for both the evolutionary process of Life and the homeostatic process of living. If that property turns out to be inessential for them, my functionalist metaethical theory will lie in tatters. What I daren't do (and am fortunately not inclined to do) is posit a time when full-blown reflexive functionality arose from origins that were in no way reflexively functional.³

     It is the belief in such precipitous origins of essences that constitutes mistaken essentialism. It has led us to imagine there are thresholds for things like purpose, design, intentionality, language, agency, morality, interests, meaning, and intelligence -- that such properties each emerged all at once from antecedents that were not of the same kind.

     Dennett's (1995, p. 425 note 10) rejoinder to a remark by Fred Dretske serves as a good synopsis:

This is our old problem of essentialism, in a new guise. It echoes the desire to zoom in on a crucial moment and thereby somehow identify a threshold that marks the first member of a species, or the birth of a real function, or the origin of life, and as such it manifests a failure to accept the fundamental Darwinian idea that all such excellences emerge gradually by finite increments.

     When examining Gibbard's work (or any other purporting to be Galilean), we must consequentially be vigilant for anthropomorphist or essentialist signs of pseudo-Galileanism. To illustrate, consider Gibbard's statement (62) that "Darwinian theory explains away this talk of nature's purpose." He is expressing the standard view that what appears to be purpose in nature isn't purpose at all. In fact, however, what the theory explains away is the notion that true purpose is intelligent purpose -- that nature's algorithm by which excellences are produced doesn't deserve to be thought of as purpose of any kind.

     This is perhaps the most difficult notion for pseudo-Galileans to accept: that the "design" evident in organisms and the apparent "intentionality" of the evolutionary process are not illuminated by their similarity to human design and intentionality. Quite the opposite. As Dennett (1995, pp. 425-427) describes the modern theory derived from the work of Richard Dawkins (1976), we exhibit derived rather than original intentionality. "Our intentionality is derived, after all, from the intentionality of our selfish genes. They are the Unmeant Meaners, not us!"

     If that sounds disagreeable, I'm afraid it gets worse. I claim that the intentionality of our selfish genes is derived from something even more fundamental: reflexive functionality. That claim can't be defended here, but is pursued in Van Cleave (1997).

     Why should resistance to Galilean reduction in the realm of mind and culture be so powerful? Dennett (1995, pp. 74-80) notes that we tend to seek skyhooks rather than cranes to explain our special human qualities.

Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, and exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process.

     Galilean explanations must rely exclusively upon cranes.

     It is important to note how strong the lure is to believe that some explanations must rely on non-physical Mind (if not God's, then yours, mine, or ours). It influences even those who should be the most committed to Galilean explanations. As a prominent example, Dennett (1995, pp. 262-312) exposes in considerable detail the attraction to skyhooks displayed by the great popularizer of evolutionary theory, Stephen Jay Gould. In Nature's Mind, a book devoted to explaining the role of selection in both the origins and the operation of the mind (and, secondarily, to discussing the endemic resistance to those notions), Michael Gazzaniga (1992, pp. 20-26) had already noted this tendency of Gould's: "He doesn't want to be part of a species that finds all of its traits derived from natural selection. He wants culture to take some responsibility too."

     Gould's view hinges on the notion (alluded to earlier) that, although all of our neurochemical mechanisms are evolved, some of them are now doing jobs for which they weren't designed, but which accidentally suited them. These new functions are not adaptations, he argues, but exaptations -- his term for the expropriation of evolved mechanisms or nonfunctional parts by a new function. He sees exaptation as a "potentially fundamental" and "non-Darwinian" alternative to adaptation.

     Dennett (1995, p. 281) squelches Gould's revolutionary aspirations:

But, according to orthodox Darwinism, every adaptation is one sort of exaptation or the other -- this is trivial, since no function is eternal; if you go back far enough, you will find that every adaptation has developed out of predecessor structures each of which either had some other use or no use at all.

     What Dennett doesn't specifically explain, but I think is equally obvious and pertinent, is that exapted traits such as the human ones at issue have not been exhaustively selected against -- yet. An adaptation is an exaptation that has been (or will be, if one can tell such things) acquitted by selection. However, unless selection pressures are strong enough, useless and even deleterious exaptations can persist in any species that is robust enough (thanks to its history of adaptation) to survive in spite of them.

     Put another way, evolution is a two-step process: variation and selection. In any given generation, variation produces traits that can't quite be said to have evolved until they have contributed to differential reproduction for some generations of their owners; just how many generations are required for this isn't quantifiable according to the theory, but it depends on whether the environment provides tests that can separate organisms with the trait from those without it.

     Some of humanity's recently acquired traits are obviously (logically and probably self-evidently) adaptive: language and logic are good examples. We have good reason to doubt that any kind of real-world selective process could eliminate these as valuable traits for humans to possess, for we can see how they increase our powers to deal with the world under almost any circumstances.

     On the other hand, other recent human propensities are obviously (logically, but emphatically not self-evidently) nonadaptive: notably, the tendency to spend most of one's resources indulging appetites for food, sex, and other primitive stimuli far beyond any survival or reproductive needs they were "designed" to meet. This point should become clearer as we proceed.

     How does one argue against me that human culture is purely an exaptation rather than an adaptation in any respect? First, one treats the rudimentary cultures of our primate cousins as different in kind from ours, for they lack the conceptual richness of human cultures. One appeals to the well-documented versatility of the human brain, which adapts itself to solve all manner of novel problems. The idea is that one's psychological development responds to the specifics of one's environment -- and that the most significant part of our environment, as humans, is culture. Our current cultural environment, then, gets credit for determining the way our evolved brain winds up functioning.

2.3 Emphasis on Current Environment

     But the current environment is another focus of anti-Galilean thinking, whereby human behavior is seen as a response to the current environment, but not (in any important way) to the evolutionary process that determined how humans respond to various ordinary contingencies. Dennett (1995, p. 425 note 10) characterizes the view this way:

[T]he current environment must do the shaping of the organism before the shape "counts" as having real intentionality; past environments, filtered through the wisdom of engineers or a history of natural selection, don't count -- even if they result in the very same functional structures.

     We'll find this view lurking behind Gibbard's rejection of normative facts: he can't find them in current circumstances, and doesn't suspect they will turn out to be a variety of material fact anyway, so he abandons the search. This is our natural mode of thinking, for we are designed to respond to current circumstances rather than to reflect on our mechanisms of response. But an attempt at Galilean explanation that focuses on current circumstances is entirely misbegotten. It's like saying that a computer responds to incoming data, but not to its programming.

     Put correctly, programming is how a computer responds to data, and behaviors generated by evolved mechanisms are how a human responds to the current environment. A functional how account of either of these cases does real explanatory work, providing at least a sketch of a causal chain from stimulus to response; but an account that a computer processes data via a program, or that a human responds to its environment with evolved mechanisms and strategies, is really of little explanatory value.

     As we'll see, Gibbard explains that human normativity is an evolved phenomenon. Better, he also explains that the evolutionary benefit of such normativity was in allowing humans to coordinate their feelings and behaviors (or, put a bit differently, why human normativity was evolutionarily adaptive). He even takes a vague stab in the how direction, speculating that the right hemisphere of our neocortex may have evolved (in part) to produce essential feelings (guilt and shame) for human normativity. This is just the sort of causal story that (carried far enough) can achieve Galilean reduction, but I claim Gibbard's effort falls far short of the goal.

     Worse, Gibbard's that explanations for human normativity apply equally well to our primate ancestors and cousins (though his intent is to distinguish human normativity from the normativity of "beasts") -- and his explanation of how key normative emotions are produced is contradicted by the best current theory in neuropsychology.