I definitely agree that evolutionary stories can become non-explanatory just-so stories. The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:
(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort.
(2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.
I do not think that humans or proto-humans ever reasoned their way to causal cognition. Rather, we have causal concepts as part of our evolutionary heritage. Some reasons to think this is right include: the fact that causal perception (pdf) and causal agency attributions emerge very early in children; the fact that other mammal species, like rats (pdf), have simple causal concepts related to interventions; and the fact that some forms of causal cognition emerge very, very early even among more distant species, like chickens.
Since causal concepts arise so early in humans and are present in other species, there is current controversy (right in line with the thesis in your OP) as to whether causal concepts are innate. That is one reason why I prefer the Adam thought experiment to babies: it is unclear whether babies already have the causal concepts or have to learn them.
EDIT: Oops, left out a paper and screwed up some formatting. Some day, I really will master markdown language.
The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:
(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort. (2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.
Yes, it’s (2) that I’m interested in. Is there some small set of axioms, on the basis of which you can set up causal reasoning, as has been done for probability theory? And which can then be used as a gold standard against which to measure our untutored fumblings that result from (1)?
I definitely agree that evolutionary stories can become non-explanatory just-so stories. The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:
(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort. (2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.
I do not think that humans or proto-humans ever reasoned their way to causal cognition. Rather, we have causal concepts as part of our evolutionary heritage. Some reasons to think this is right include: the fact that causal perception (pdf) and causal agency attributions emerge very early in children; the fact that other mammal species, like rats (pdf), have simple causal concepts related to interventions; and the fact that some forms of causal cognition emerge very, very early even among more distant species, like chickens.
Since causal concepts arise so early in humans and are present in other species, there is current controversy (right in line with the thesis in your OP) as to whether causal concepts are innate. That is one reason why I prefer the Adam thought experiment to babies: it is unclear whether babies already have the causal concepts or have to learn them.
EDIT: Oops, left out a paper and screwed up some formatting. Some day, I really will master markdown language.
Yes, it’s (2) that I’m interested in. Is there some small set of axioms, on the basis of which you can set up causal reasoning, as has been done for probability theory? And which can then be used as a gold standard against which to measure our untutored fumblings that result from (1)?