Dennett, Daniel

Dennett, Daniel C. Beyond Belief. In Intentional Stance, 117-211. 

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. 1991. 

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin s Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York Simon Schuster, 1995. 

Dennett, Daniel. 1994. Cognitive science as reverse engineering Several meanings of top down and bottom up . In Logic, methodology and philosophy of science IX, ed. D. Pravritz, B. Skyrms, and D. Westerstahl, 679-689. Oxford Elsevier Science. 

For more than thirty-five years, I ve been studying evolution - originally the evolution of cancer (Shostak and Tammariello, 1969 Shostak, 1981), and more recently, the evolution of tissues (Shostak, 1993 Shostak and Kolluri, 1995). During this time, I have encountered reductionism, sometimes as a prod and frequently as an obstacle. I have learned, thereby, to appreciate the difficulties that reductionism presents for studying evolution. Thus, when Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of evolution and consciousness, asks in his perennially popular, Darwin s Dangerous Idea, Who s Afraid of Reductionism (Dennett, 1995, p. 80) I m compelled to answer I am and explain why. 

Stan Shostak Well this is the word that Daniel Dennett uses. He defines bland reductionism as something no sane scientist disputes, and I dispute it. He defines good reductionism as simply the commitment to non-questioning science without any cheating, erasing, mysteries, or miracles at the outset. Anyone who takes a non-reductionist posture is thus invoking miracles ... 

See for example the paper by Daniel C. Dennett, "The intentional stance in theory and practice" for an appreciation of the "levels of intentionality" necessary and implicit in social interaction, ibid., chapter 14, ppl80-202. (back)... 

This perhaps startling point of view is admirably explained and defended by Daniel Dennett in his lucid philosophical meditation on Darwinian theory, Darwin s Dangerous Idea, where he neatly explains the necessity for Platonic thinking by using this intriguing thought experiment ... 

All of this raises the question of why some physicists appear to take such a naive view of biology, even though they clearly are not naive about their own subject. In his interesting book Darwin s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett suggests that what physicists miss in biological theory is a set of laws that allow the properties and states of systems to be expressed in simple (or not so simple) mathematical equations. But natural selection is not a law in this sense rather it describes a procedure, what computer scientists would call an... 

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