Abstract
Fitch [5] has not only articulated a growing consensus, after decades of ideological quarreling, about how to put cognitive science together, but in the process has attempted to advance the unification process with some bold strokes of his own. His proposal [4] that we take seriously the perspective which replaces “spherical neurons” (McCulloch Pitts logical neurons and their close kin) with neurons that are micro-agents with agendas and computational talents of their own, has been taken up by a variety of theorists, including myself [2,3]. Now his dendrophilia hypothesis promises to distill the core truths energizing the heated debates about the innate equipment that distinguishes the cognitive competences of our species from all others. Whether this promise can be kept is a wide-open empirical question, but Fitch has given us enough specification to justify a serious investment in answering it. One particularly useful achievement of the essay is Fitch’s banishment of a host of outdated ideologies: the learned vs. innate dichotomy, the autonomy thesis, boxology, and other oversimplifications that have largely outlived their usefulness. I applaud all of these exorcisms save one: there is still much value in the software/hardware distinction when it is applied to human minds, as I will try to show briefly. Fitch wastes little time dismissing the distinction:
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