Free Of Minds and Language by Pello Juan; Salaburu Massimo; Uriagereka Piattelli-Palmarini

he gave a very bad evolutionary argument for this. He said that evolution has adapted us to find the right kinds of solutions to natural problems, but that cannot possibly be true. There is nothing in human evolution that led people to figure out quantumtheory, or classical mechanics, or anything, so that can’t be right. That is just one of the worst kinds of pseudo-Darwinism. So maybe what it is leading us to is something totally wrong, and if somebody is looking at this, say some Martian with different cognitive structures, they could see we are just asking the wrong questions. We are not asking the right questions because they are not within our range. We can’t ask those right questions; we aren’t built for it. And if we can ask them, we can’t answer them. So take the questions, this first-person perspective thing, which is a big issue in philosophy: what is it like to be a bat? (a famous article); 33 what is it like to be me? There are no sensible answers to those questions. I cannot tell you what it is like to be me. If something has an interrogative form and there are no sensible answers to it, it is not a real question; it just has an interrogative form. It is like “How do things happen?” You know, it sounds like a question, but there is no possible answer to it.
    So I don’t think these are even questions. You can give a naturalist interpretation of such matters, and maybe there is a right question and we just can’t formulate it, because we’re just not built that way. So if there is one, we may not find it. That is Peirce’s concern. Well, to get back to your question, I can’t add anything to that, and I don’t think anybody has added anything to it in a hundred years. In fact, they haven’t even looked at it. The term abduction has been picked up, but it is used for something else. It is used for best-theory construction or something like that, whatever that means, but that is just rephrasing the question.
    It seems to me the answer has to come from some kind of study of what this organ is, this science-forming organ. Now Sue Carey, whom I mentioned, has been trying to show that it is just the natural extension of ordinary, common-sense figuring out what the world is like (Carey 1985). But that seems to me to be extremely unlikely. Of course it is interesting stuff, but it seems to me to be going in the wrong direction. Whatever this crazy thing is that scientists do, it seems to me very much disconnected from sort of finding your way in the world. I mean, people talk about it, the search for symmetry – there is a famous book about that 34 – and Galileo talked about how Nature has to be perfect and it is the task of scientists to find it. You do have these guiding intuitions and so everybody follows on, more or less, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with sort of getting around in the world. So it is a serious open question, and it could be – it is an empirical question, in principle: what is the nature of Peirce’s abductive instinct? Maybe somebody can tell me something. A lot of you know more about this than I do, but I don’t know of any work on it, philosophical orempirical or anything else. It has just kind of been left to the side, and again, as far as I know, Peirce’s essay wasn’t even discussed for about sixty years.
    D OVER : You have a long-held view that the human capacity for language is an evolved biological system and, as such, there has to be a genetic basis for it – no different in kind from any other specific feature of human biology. I don’t think anyone would want to refute that, but I sense, if I understood you correctly, that you want to go beyond that.
    Within the minimalist program, my understanding of which is very shaky indeed, I sense you want to bring forth something beyond the genes. That is, we have what you call principles of natural law. However, I want to point out that