640 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
cerebral resolutions of the same visual reality) in the famous optical illusion known
as the Necker Cube:
After a few more seconds the mental image flips back and it continues to
alternate as long as we look at the picture. The point is that neither of the
two perceptions of the cube is the correct nor "true" one. They are equally
correct. Similarly the vision of life that I advocate, and label with the name
of the extended phenotype is not probably more correct than the orthodox
view. It is a different view and I suspect that, at least in some respects, it
provides a deeper understanding. But I doubt that there is any experiment
that could be done to prove my claim (1982, p. 1).Moreover, we really needn't quarrel over our choices because the issue can
achieve no empirical resolution in any case. I'll push my preference (and hope to
persuade you of its greater capacity for mind stretching, its superior literary charm,
or its greater tickling of the fancy); and you can then advocate your opposite, and
equally valid, version. Dawkins begins his book: "This is a work of unabashed
advocacy. I want to argue in favor of a particular way of looking at animals and
plants, and a particular way of wondering why they do the things that they do.
What I am advocating is not a new theory, not a hypothesis which can be verified
or falsified, not a model which can be judged by its predictions... I am not trying to
convince anyone of the truth of any factual proposition" (1982, p. 1). This
argument about equally valid, but quite inverse, perspectives on a common reality
pervades the entire book, as in this late passage (1982, p. 232): "The whole story
could have been told in ... the language of individual manipulation. The language
of extended genetics is not demonstrably more correct. It is a different way of
saying the same thing. The Necker Cube has flipped. Readers must decide for
themselves whether they like the new view better than the old."
Among professional philosophers, such Necker-Cube thinking goes by the
name of conventionalism, an argument that frameworks of explanation cannot be
judged as true or false, or even more or less empirically adequate—but only as
equally correct, and only as more or less preferable by such nonfactual criteria as
depth of insight provided or satisfaction gained in understanding. Conventionalism
may offer an interesting and fruitful approach, especially for some scientific
debates that seem especially refractory to empirical resolution—and also (more
generally) for teaching people that ideas and attitudes influence science; and that
"naive realism," with its assumption that improved theories arise only from
observation, represents a silly and bankrupt approach to the natural world.
But conventionalism cannot apply to this case because an empirical resolution
exists, and the apparent Necker-cube duality of gene or organism does not denote,
as Dawkins mistakenly argues, two equally valid perspectives on the same issue,
but rather expresses a correct vs. a false view of the nature of causality in
Darwinian theory. Dawkins has misconstrued his categories in judging gene-based
and organism-based viewpoints as alternative versions of