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  1. I think it is an interesting summary of her view, but there is no much new stuff on it.
    One of the things that she makes clear is that her overall strategy is to look for selection process at different levels; not only at the level oof genes/traits, but also at the level of operant conditions, thought and even language.
    Personally, I’m always a bit suspicious about this strategy.. I have two main worries: one is that it is not always clear to me what problems these selection processes are supposed to solve; secondly, when clearly there is aproblem, I’m not sure these strategy can help to solve it.
    The more obvious example is the case of thought. In the talk she says that the fact that we formulate hypotesis, discard some of them and finally pick up just one can be seen as a selection process. But what is this selection process supposed to explain? what is the proper function of the belief that gets selected? It is not clear at all. Of course, if we are able to understand and select the most interesting hypothesis, it means that they are full-blooded beliefs. So I do this selection process is not intended to explain why they exist or have the content they have.
    But there is a more general worry with this strategy; in the original (and old) discussion around the notion of function, we learned that the kind of selection process that gives rise to functions must be quite restricted, otherwise we will end up over attributing functions to rocks, whirlpools and so on (I can’t think of any particular example right now). My worry is that if we don’t restrict the selection process to natural selection (and maybe operant conditioning..) we will be falling into some kind of ‘panfunctionalism’.

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