Como pensam as espécies?

Abstract

How do species think? Daniel Dennett has insisted in different occasions
that Darwin’s Adaptationist Program constitutes a legitimate and hardly
displaceable translation of the intentional point of view in the Biology
field. However, in order for us to be able to state this thesis clearly and to
avoid getting into the domain of mere metaphor – which is not Dennett’s
purpose -, we have to single out what intentional system the behaviour of
which we study on such a perspective. That being noted, we shall argue,
contrary to the alternative that Dennett himself picked out, and close to
Karl Popper’s suggestion, that such a system is not nature as a whole, but
the system made up by a population or a class of organisms: those are the
agents of the adaptative processes. We do not, however, aim at contradicting
Dennett’s overall strategy; rather, we aim at reinforcing it.