Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  In the case of Philby’s ultimate beliefs, we have a tantalizing glimpse of how close we might come in the real world (as contrasted with the strange world of many philosophers’ thought experiments) to a case of indeterminacy of radical interpretation (see David Lewis’s essay “Radical Interpretation,” 1974, in the Synthese issue). We may imagine two indefatigable observers, following Philby’s every move, recording his every utterance, reading his most secret papers, listening to him talk in his sleep, and even (now we’re back in philosophy land) recording his every brainwave; and we can see that they might, on the same evidence, come up with staunchly held opposing verdicts: he’s a loyal Brit after all; no, he’s a loyal Soviet.

  It would be no use just asking Philby, of course; both observers are well aware of how he’s going to respond to such a query, and their opposing theories account for it about equally well. (For a related argument, see my discussion of the beliefs of “Ella” in “Real Patterns,” 1991b.) No doubt it is hugely unlikely that in such a case neither of the two interpretations would ever unravel, but (Quine insisted) not impossible. That was his point. In every real-world situation, probably, two such radically different interpretations of a whole life history would balance on the knife edge of no verdict for only a short time, and eventually one interpretation would collapse, leaving the other victorious, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of supposing that this was a metaphysical certainty, guaranteed by some special inner fact that settled the issue. We can even come to see, from this perspective, that Philby might himself come to wonder which view was the truth—and not be able to tell! This problem would also face the imagined bilingual who is asked which translation manual is right. He might be astonished to discover that he himself had no resources to say which was “right,” and in that case, Quine insisted, there would be no fact of the matter about which was right. They would be equally good translations, and that’s all one could say.

  If the point still eludes you, it may help to consider a simpler case of the same phenomenon, my “Quinian Crossword Puzzle.” It is not easy concocting a crossword puzzle with two equally good solutions, but here is one. Which is the real solution? Neither, for I deliberately set out to make it that way. In principle, it is possible to make a higher-dimension crossword puzzle, a Philby, whose whole structure and history and current set of proclivities are equally amenable to two different intentional interpretations. In practice, impossible, but we should not, for that reason, imagine a category of inner facts that would settle any case.

  Notes

  1 Breaking Which Spell?

  1. I discussed the example of Dicrocelium dendriticum in Dennett, 2003c; for more on its fascinating life cycle, see Ridley, 1995, and Sober and Wilson, 1998. For a striking case of a fish parasite, see LoBue and Bell (1993). A parasite of mice, Toxoplasma gondii, will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. The epigram from Hugh Pyper is found in Blackmore (1999), as well as in Pyper (1998). All references can be found in the bibliography at the end of the book, and in general will be inserted in the text, not footnoted. Notes such as this will be used to expand on the points in the text in ways that may be of interest only to specialists.

  2. Why the potential for breeding loyalty was present in dogs but not in cats is itself an interesting chapter of biology, but it would take us far afield. For more on the limits of domestication, see Diamond, 1997.

  3. Here are two of the best-known definitions of religion with which to compare mine:

  …a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church. [Emil Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life]

  (1) A system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. [Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures]

  4. These transformations typically happen gradually. Doesn’t there have to have been a Prime Mammal, the first mammal whose mother was not a mammal? Not really. There doesn’t have to be a principled way of drawing the boundary between the therapsids, those descendants of reptiles whose descendants include all the mammals, and the mammals (for a discussion of this perennially puzzling point, see Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2003c, pp. 126–28). A religion of long standing could turn into a former religion gradually, as its participants gradually shed the doctrines and practices that mark the genuine article. No value judgment is implied by such a description; mammals are former therapsids and birds are former dinosaurs, and none the worse for it. Of course the legal implications of whether or not the boundary had been crossed would have to be settled, but this is a political issue, like the moral status of the octopus, not a theoretical issue.

  5. May the Force Be With You! Is Luke Skywalker religious? Think how differentluld react to this incantation if the Force were presented by George Lucas as satanic. The recent popularity of cinematic sagas with fictional religions—The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix offer two other examples—is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. It is hard to imagine such delicate topics being tolerated in earlier times. Our growing self-consciousness about religion and religions is a good thing, I think, for all its excesses. Like science fiction generally, it can open our eyes to other possibilities, and put the actual world in better perspective.

  6. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Freudian psychoanalysis was riding high, critics who tried to point out to its devotees the many weaknesses and mistakes of Freud’s theory were typically stymied by an infuriatingly bland wall of psychoanalytic deflection, along the lines of “Let’s see if we can figure out why you’re so hostile to psychoanalysis, and why you feel this emotional need to ‘refute’ its claims. Why don’t you start by telling us about your relations with your mother….” This was question-begging (or circular reasoning) even when it was sincerely meant, and it was often simply dishonest. I recognize that my postponement of consideration of the issue of whether God exists may be seen by those who are armed with arguments as a similarly unprincipled evasion of intellectual responsibility. But if I began this book with their issue, framed as it traditionally is, it would take hundreds of pages of plowing over familiar terrain before I could ever get to a novel contribution. Bear with me, please. I will not forget my obligation to treat this topic!

  2 Some Questions About Science

  1. For more on the role of science in avoidance, and the explosion of “evitability” that human civilization has achieved, see my Freedom Evolves, 2003c.

  2. Following recent practice, I use the term “Islamist” to refer to those radical or fundamentalist strains of Islamic thought that in general condemn democracy, women’s rights, and the freedom of inquiry in which science and technology can flourish. Many, probably most, Islamic thinkers and leaders are deeply opposed to the Islamist position.

  3. The only study I have found is Anderson and Prentice, 1994.

  3 Why Good Things Happen

  1.In a few cases I met with small groups of coreligionists, and the occasional discovery by my informants of differences among them was particularly telling, perhaps even life-changing in a few instances.

  2.Current thinking is that the various coyote calls serve different purposes. The bloodcurdling “group yip-howl” is most plausibly “important in announcing territorial occupancy and preventing visual contact between groups of coyotes” (Lehner, 1978a, p. 144; see also Lehner, 1978b). If you can avoid an actual battle over territory by engaging in impressive saber-rattling, this may be the thrifty way of preserving energy and health for another day’s hunting. On this hypothesis, the signal’s impressive volume is a hard-to-fake sign of its
veracity, a common phenomenon in animal communication. (See Hauser, 1996, chapter 6, for an excellent discussion of the theoretical and experimental investigations of the evolution of honest signaling.) It also suggests some interesting experiments to be conducted in using high-quality playbacks of recorded coyote howls to regulate population densities. Would the coyotes catch on? How long would it take?

  3.An opening survey of the voluminous literature on creationism and Intelligent Design should include: Pennock, 1999, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism; Perakh, 2003, Unintelligent Design; Shanks, 2004, God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory; Young and Edis, 2004, Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism; and National Academy of Sciences, 1999, Science and Creationism. The May–August 2004 issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education reviewed several dozen recent books on the topic, including more than a dozen (of varying quality) written from a Christian or Jewish perspective. For excellent surveys of contemporary evolutionary biology, I highly recommend the anthology of current work edited by Moya and Font, 2004, Evolution: From Molecules to Ecosystems; the two-volume Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Pagel, 2002; and the seventh edition of the textbook Life: The Science of Biology, by Purves, et al., 2004. There are also dozens of good Web sites on which one can find authoritative and fair refutations of the work of the most prominent critics of evolution, such as William Dembski and Michael Behe. The National Center for Science Education is one of the best, at http://www.ncseweb.org.

  There are also plenty of Web sites devoted to Intelligent Design, of course, but no serious peer-reviewed journals. Why might that be? If Intelligent Design were an idea whose time has come, you would think that young scientists would be dashing around their labs, glued to their computers, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology. Intelligent Design fans insist that the scientific establishment has a bias against their work that makes it impossible for them to break into the mainstream journals, but this is simply not credible. The Discovery Institute and other well-funded havens for Intelligent Design research could easily afford to produce a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal if there were anything to publish in it, and if they could find credible scientists to do the peer reviewing. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles are published every year elaborating and extending the basic theory of evolution, and most of the authors of these articles never become famous, in spite of their proven expertise. Surely a few of them would happily jump ship and risk ridicule from the establishment for the chance to become world-famous as the Scientist Who Refuted Darwin. But the backers of creationism don’t even bother offering the lure. They know better. They know that all they have going for them is propaganda, so that is what they spend their endowment on.

  William Dembski (2003) has made available a list of four (count ’em!) peer-reviewed scientific articles that, he says, support Intelligent Design themes. (He also lists his own 1998 book, which is indeed published in a peer-reviewed series by Cambridge University Press.) But Dembski’s own comments on these essays make it clear that their arguments are at best, as he puts it, “non-Darwinian” (they are conducted without any specifically Darwinian premises), and hence might be put to use in support of an Intelligent Design argument. None of them actually advances an argument for Intelligent Design.

  4. This standard way of talking masks a complication. When we speak of “half your genes” here, we mean half of those of your genes that are idiosyncratic, that distinguish you, genetically, from others in your species. In cloning, whatever genes you have that make you “special” (for better or for worse) get passed on in toto to your offspring. In sexual reproduction, only half of those genes show up in your offspring; your mate provides the balance of the idiosyncratic genes.

  5. Does money emerge from pure barter systems by a series of gradual and scarcely noticed shifts in practice (the “commodity” theory), or does it always require some sort of “fiat” from some state authority or conscious agreement or compact (the “chartal” theory)? The origin of money has been debated for centuries. For a fascinating discussion of the history of the debate, together with some elegant economic models of the possible processes, see Awai, 2001. See also Burdett et al., 2001; and Seabright, 2004.

  6. It is possible, of course, that in fact some one historical individual did so much of the early design work on money, or language, or music that he or she deserves the title of author, but this is extremely unlikely and entirely unnecessary. Evolution permits cultural design innovations to accumulate so gradually that authorship gets distributed over millions of clueless innovators over thousands of generations, just like the design innovations that revise genes.

  7. The difference in the reproduction system makes a huge difference, of course. When the mint changes the year engraved on the die with which it stamps all the coins it makes, this is a sort of mutation, but such mutations don’t accumulate, normally. If a nick or blemish in the die doesn’t get repaired, it may mark all the coins for many years, and even get copied onto the successor die (if one of the coins it has made is chosen as the male from which the new female die is made), and that is more like a genetic mutation that gets transmitted to offspring.

  8. On the imagined “intrinsic” value of money, see “Consciousness: How Much Is That in Real Money?,” in Dennett, 2005c.

  9. On what it is like to be a turkey vulture, see Dennett, 1995a, reprinted in Dennett, 1998a.

  10. Biologists can perhaps better understand the resistance of many social scientists to the biologizing of their disciplines by reflecting on their own discomfort with attempts to…physicize biology. Ernst Mayr, the legendary evolutionary biologist, recently published a book (shortly after his hundredth birthday) on the autonomy of biology, showing why it doesn’t “reduce” to physics (Mayr, 2004). I agree with most of the claims he makes. He is not declaring that physics provides no constraints or principles that biologists must understand and may exploit. There are different brands of reductionism; only some of them—which I call greedy reductionisms (Dennett, 1995b)—are mistakes. When somebody declares that a view under attack is reductionistic, we have to look closely to see whether this is a bad thing.

  11. Among those credited with this aphorism are the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the artist Paul Klee, and the critic Viktor Shklovsky.

  12. Of course there are plenty of intermediate cases, in which boatbuilders have some idea or other, good or bad, dim or brilliant, behind the mutations that they introduce, which are thus not all slips of the adze. What seemed like a good idea at the time may prove worthless in fairly short order. This speeds up the design process, but in both directions—larger bad ideas get tried out in the trial-and-error process as well as good ideas. Richard Dawkins has proposed to call designs-without-designers “designoid” (1996, p. 4). The coinage is useful for marking the error people often make in supposing that anything that appears designed must have been produced by a deliberate conscious mind, but it shouldn’t be taken to mark a bright line in nature. Are the short legs of dachshunds design or designoid? Human breeders set out to achieve the effect, and they had reasons for it. Are genetically engineered organisms design or designoid? Is the beaver’s dam that ingeniously makes use of local and unprecedented opportunities for dam-building design or designoid? A beaver’s dam requires considerably more cognitive talent to build than the ant lion’s conical sand trap. The work of exploring the grand unity of Design Space is distributed between the slow ratcheting of natural selection of genes, and the swift trial-and-error explorations of individual brains (and their numerous artifactual exploration vehicles), so I will continue to use the umbrella term “design” to cover it all.

  13. One of the main themes of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(Dennett, 1995b) is that what Darwin discovered is fundamentally an algorithm, an information-processing recipe that can be executed in many different media, just as the long-division algorithm can be done with pencil, pen, chalk, or scratching with a stick on the ground.

  14. For more on memes, see also Dennett, 1995b, 2001b, 2001c, 2005c, and appendix C of this book.

  15. For some of the details, see Dawkins, 2004a, pp. 31–32.

  16. Group selection has had a controversial career in evolutionary theory, and technical disputes make it treacherous territory for the uninitiated. See Wilson and Sober, 1994 (and all the commentaries published in the same journal); Sober and Wilson, 1998; and Dennett, 2002a (and Sober and Wilson’s reply in the same journal). Wilson’s views will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.

  4 The Roots of Religion

  1. There is no consensus among surveys about how to count religions (as contrasted with cults and other typically short-lived organizations), but by any benchmark there are many thousand distinct (independent, noncommunicating) religions. The almanacs have identified over thirty thousand distinct Christian churches. The more or less standard reference work for all religions is Barrett et al., World Christian Encyclopedia (2nd ed., 2001). Religions crop up so frequently that even Web sites have difficulty keeping their lists up to date. A few good ones are http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm and http://www.watchman.org/cat95.htm—the latter indexes over a thousand new cults and religions. There are also journals and other organizations devoted to the study of new religions, easily found on the Web.