scribed as a different kind of mental "thing." How, in short, can such an intellectual
entity be defined? And what degree of change can be tolerated or accommodated
within the structure of such an entity before we must alter the name and declare the
entity invalid or overthrown? Or do such questions just represent a fool's errand
from the start, because intellectual positions can't be reified into sufficient
equivalents of buildings or organisms to bear the weight of such an inquiry?
As arrogant as I may be in general, I am not sufficiently doltish or
vainglorious to imagine that I can meaningfully address the deep philosophical
questions embedded within this general inquiry of our intellectual ages—that is,
fruitful modes of analysis for the history of human thought. I shall therefore take
refuge in an escape route that has traditionally been granted to scientists: the liberty
to act as a practical philistine. Instead of suggesting a principled and general
solution, I shall ask whether I can specify an operational way to define
"Darwinism" (and other intellectual entities) in a manner specific enough to win
shared agreement and understanding among readers, but broad enough to avoid the
doctrinal quarrels about membership and allegiance that always seem to arise when
we define intellectual commitments as pledges of fealty to lists of dogmata (not to
mention initiation rites, secret handshakes and membership cards—in short, the
intellectual paraphernalia that led Karl Marx to make his famous comment to a
French journalist: "je ne suis pas marxiste").
As a working proposal, and as so often in this book (and in human affairs in
general), a "Goldilocks solution" embodies the blessedly practical kind of approach
that permits contentious and self-serving human beings (God love us) to break
intellectual bread together in pursuit of common goals rather than personal
triumph. (For this reason, I have always preferred, as guides to human action,
messy hypothetical imperatives like the Golden Rule, based on negotiation,
compromise and general respect, to the Kantian categorical imperatives of absolute
righteousness, in whose name we so often murder and maim until we decide that
we had followed the wrong instantiation of the right generality.) We must, in short
and in this case, steer between the "too little" of refusing to grant any kind of
"essence," or hard anatomy of defining concepts, to a theory like Darwinism; and
the "too much" of an identification so burdened with a long checklist of exigent
criteria that we will either spend all our time debating the status of particular items
(and never addressing the heart or central meaning of the theory), or we will waste
our efforts, and poison our communities, with arguments about credentials and
anathemata, applied to individual applicants for membership.
In his brilliant attempt to write a "living" history and philosophy of science
about the contemporary restructuring of taxonomic theory by phenetic and cladistic
approaches, Hull (1988) presents the most cogent argument I have ever read for
"too little" on Goldilocks's continuum, as embodied in his defense of theories as
"conceptual lineages" (1988, pp. 15-18). I enthusiastically support Hull's decision
to treat theories as "things," or individuals in the crucial sense of coherent
historical entities—and in opposition to the stan-
8 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY