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Comparing Dennett's 'Tower Of Generate And Test'

635 Words3 Pages

Kayla Southworth
Professor Nichols
Paper 1
September 28, 2015
The plasticity of differences In the piece “Tower of Generate and Test” by philosopher Dan Dennett, he talks about creatures and the characteristics that make them that certain kind of creature. Dennett goes about doing this by setting the piece up in an hierarchy pattern where the base is Darwinian creatures which builds up to Skinnerian creatures and Popperian creatures. Now while, Dennett makes the claim that Skinnerian creatures and Popperian creatures are subcategories of Darwinian creatures, when he goes on to explain the respective subcategory it becomes evident that they differ from Darwinian creatures. They differ in that they contain phenotypic plasticity in their behavior on different levels based on their placement in the tower with one containing a learning capability and the other containing a gene that internally allows them to know the outcome beforehand, while Darwinian creatures do not contain these types of capabilities. Dennett presents the idea of phenotypic plasticity in the Skinnerian creatures when he talks about reinforces on page 85. It is in this section, that he talks about …show more content…

These types of creatures do not contain this because the creature if they were to need to change their behavior they would not be able to causing for their demise as they would not be able to adapt to the changes needed due to the predetermined gene they contain (Dennett 84). It is from those predetermined genes that it can indeed be concluded that Darwinian creatures do in fact differ from Skinnerian and Popperian creatures.

Work cited
Dennett, Daniel. "The Tower of Generate and Test." Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic, 1996. 81-93.

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