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Agential thinking

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Abstract

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a brilliant propaganda stroke against what is actually a useful way of thinking. Compared to the dangers of teleological thinking in biology, the dangers of agential thinking have unfortunately rarely been discussed. Drawing on recent work by Samir Okasha, I attempt to remedy this omission, through analyzing the nature of agential thinking, and providing a philosophical treatment of the unexamined dangers in this peculiar, yet tempting way of thinking.

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Notes

  1. Which is not to say that metaphors don’t play important roles in science (see Veit and Ney 2021).

  2. See Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017, p. 34).

  3. See Veit (forthcomingb) for a recent essay review.

  4. Indeed, agential language is found throughout his recent monograph Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016b). It will hardly be surprising that many see a close connection between the evolution of agency and consciousness (see Ginsburg and Jablonka 2019; Browning and Veit 2021; Veit 2021b, forthcoming a), but this topic is beyond the scope of this paper.

  5. See Millikan (1984); Neander (1983).

  6. The English language is unfortunately ambiguous in its use of the term ‘reason’ between these contexts.

  7. See Dennett (1995).

  8. The allure of this ‘stance’ will be target of Sect. 3.

  9. See Veit (2018) for an earlier discussion of mine of these different responses to the nature of ‘purpose’ by Dennett and Rosenberg.

  10. Dennett (2016) regards a rigid anti-teleological stance as a conceptual mistake.

  11. It is worth noting that when Godfrey-Smith discusses agential thinking, he unfortunately restricts himself to a criticism of the selfish gene point of view—a view he has several problems with that go beyond those related to agential thinking.

  12. Naturally, much the same can be said for genes and groups, both of which are sometimes treated as agents in their own right.

  13. Simple agent-based models for evolutionary dyamics of say social behaviour can be intepreted both culturally and genetically (Veit 2019c).

  14. See for example: Thaler (2015), Sugden (2015), Kahneman and Tversky (1979), and Loewenstein (1999).

  15. See Veit (2019a).

  16. A point vigorously defended by Dennett (2017).

  17. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  18. A variety of alternative mutations allows for this phenotype.

  19. But as Hammerschmidt et al. (2014) argue, it is not meaningful to speak here of a Darwinian individual in its own right, unless it has some way of reproduction. See also Okasha (2006) and Godfrey-Smith (2009).

  20. See also Davies (2004).

  21. Assuming one did not reach the summit in a snow-storm and is hence unable to see anything beyond a one meter radius.

  22. In a forthcoming paper, I argue that we can understand natural selection itself as an ecologically scaffolded process (see Veit forthcomingc).

  23. See for instance Veit (2019b, c).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Samir Okasha, Heather Browning, Andy Gardner, two anonymous reviewers, and finally the Theory and Method in Biosciences group at the University of Sydney for their feedback on my manuscript.

Funding

This research was supported under Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Grant No. FL170100160).

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    Walter Veit

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Veit, W. Agential thinking. Synthese 199, 13393–13419 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03380-5

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