dard tactic, in conventional scholarship on the "history of ideas," of tracing the
chronology of expression for entirely abstract concepts defined only by formal
similarity of content, and not at all by ties of historical continuity, or even of
mutual awareness among defenders across centuries and varied cultures. (For
example, Hull points out that such a conventional history of the "chain of being"
would treat this notion as an invariant and disembodied Platonic archetype,
independently "borrowed" from the eternal storehouse of potential models for
natural reality, and then altered by scholars to fit local contexts across millennia
and cultures.)
But I believe that Hull's laudable desire to recast the history of ideas as a
narrative of entities in historical continuity, rather than as a disconnected
chronology of tidbits admitted into a class only by sufficient formal similarity with
an abstract ideological archetype, then leads him to an undervaluation of actual
content. Hull exemplifies his basic approach (1988, p. 17): "A consistent
application of what Mayr has termed 'population thinking' requires that species be
treated as lineages, spatiotemporally localized particulars, individuals. Hence, if
conceptual change is to be viewed from an evolutionary perspective, concepts must
be treated in the same way. In order to count as the 'same concept,' two term-
tokens must be part of the same conceptual lineage. Population thinking must be
applied to thinking itself."
So far, so good. But Hull now extends this good argument for the necessity of
historical connectivity into a claim for sufficiency as well—thus springing a logical
trap that leads him to debase, or even to ignore, the "morphology" (or idea content)
of these conceptual lineages. He states that he wishes to "organize term-tokens into
lineages, not into classes of similar term-types" (pp. 16-17). I can accept the
necessity of such historical continuity, but neither I nor most scholars (including
practicing scientists) will then follow Hull in his explicit and active rejection of
similarity in content as an equally necessary criterion for continuing to apply the
same name—Darwinian theory, for example—to a conceptual lineage.
At an extreme that generates a reductio ad absurdum for rejecting Hull's
conclusion, but that Hull bravely owns as a logical entailment of his own prior
decision, a pure criterion of continuity, imbued with no constraint of content,
forces one to apply the same name to any conceptual lineage that has remained
consciously intact and genealogically unbroken through several generations (of
passage from teachers to students, for example), even if the current "morphology"
of concepts directly inverts and contradicts the central arguments of the original
theory. "A proposition can evolve into its contradictory," Hull allows (1988, p. 18).
Thus, on this account, if the living intellectual descendants of Darwin, as defined
by an unbroken chain of teaching, now believed that each species had been
independently created within six days of 24 hours, this theory of biological order
would legitimately bear the name of "Darwinism." And I guess that I may call
myself kosher, even though I and all members of my household, by conscious
choice and with great ideological fervor, eat cheeseburgers for lunch every day—
because we made this
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 9