Abstract
Much of our thinking is concerned with abstractions. For an evolutionary naturalist it makes little sense to claim that we are able to grasp such concepts as representing a mindindependent real world since we cannot have been adapted to something that could not have had any causal influence on our cognitive faculties. Rather all so-called abstract entities are of our own making even though we all possess a tendency to think of them as real due to our ability to hypostasize or reify abstract concepts. If this is so the evolutionary naturalist must explain why it is beneficiary for survival to be able to make abstractions that have no counterparts in our immediate experience. The claim is that such abstractions are necessary for creating unity and continuity in our thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Ruse ([1986]1998), pp. 185–186.
- 2.
As well as a good part of the animal kingdom. If we can speak of animals as having beliefs, then surely the belief that there is an external world must have appeared fairly early in animal evolution. Even if they do not have beliefs per se, they surely have instincts that are predicated on the presumption of a real external world.
- 3.
See, for instance, Lowe (1998), Chap. 10.
- 4.
Hale (1987), p. 61.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 6.
See Burgess & Rosen (1997) for further criticism. See also Lowe (1998), pp. 52–53, where he argues that Hale’s proposal is fatally flawed.
- 7.
See Lowe (1998), pp. 215–216.
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Faye, J. (2016). Abstraction and Reification. In: Experience and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_6
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