The late John Davison often remarked that science could only answer “how” questions, not “why”. It seems to me philosophers, perhaps I’m really thinking of philosophers of religion rather than in general, attempt to find answers to “why” questions without always having a firm grasp on how reality works. Perhaps this is why there is so much talking past each other when the explanatory power of science vs other ways of knowing enters a discussion.
I’ve not been particularly motivated to read the anti-religious output of the “Gnu” atheists. I’ve not read Dawkins’ The God Delusion or any of Sam Harris’ output. I did read God is Not Great because someone lent me a copy which I found an entertaining polemic against some sacred cows (not the least being Mother Theresa) but I doubt I would have considered buying Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible as I have no need of such arguments being already convinced that no religious dogma has ever yet provided an answer to a “how” question.
But my eye was caught by a post at Uncommon Descent perhaps hopefully entitled “Feser Demolishes Coyne“. I’ve mentioned Edward Feser before (he teaches religious studies at Pasadena City College in California). He’s an outspoken right-wing Catholic blogger with a loyal following and a seemingly intense dislike of Jerry Coyne. The article applauded by Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent is published at “First Things” (America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion & Public Life ). Feser writes confidently and pejoritavely, finishing with a final barb:
For considered as an omnibus of concrete examples of elementary logical fallacies, Faith versus Fact is invaluable.
By Feser’s standards, the review is brief. Feser lambasts Coyne for choosing to direct his fire on the poster child of anti-science and anti-evolution, US-style Creationism, complains that Coyne defines science too broadly and that Coyne equivocates on the description scientism by embracing it. So I bought the book.
Regarding Feser’s complaint that Coyne focuses on US Creationism, in his first chapter, Coyne goes to some length to explain why he is most concerned with the US and Creationism. Creationism is rife in the US where he teaches, it is anti-evolution, a discipline that he teaches and holds dear and it is the area of scientific/religious conflict that he is familiar with.
As to defining science, Coyne writes (p 39):
In fact, I see science, conceived broadly, as any endeavour that tries to find the truth about nature using the tools of reason, observation and experiment.
Seems reasonable to me. A scientific approach is starting with some observation, some phenomenon, and moving through “that’s interesting” to “what’s going on” to hypothesis testing. But surviving everyday life relies on accepting and working with the regularities we find in the real world around us. Water won’t run uphill without a source of energy, and water running downhill can produce large and useful amounts of energy.
As to the charge of scientism, Coyne tackles this in some detail (according to Kindle, Coyne uses the word 43 times in the book). He points out “scientism” is invariably a pejorative term used to denigrate the idea of scientific endeavour as the only way to know anything about the external world. He demonstrates the equivocal meaning of scientism by suggesting four shades of meaning and embraces the first – that science is “the sole source of reliable facts about the universe.” By that definition, Coyne cheerfully admits:
…most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue -the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them.
I propose Feser’s review as evidence supporting my hypothesis that scientists concern themselves with how things really are and religious philosophers seem to ignore reality when clinging on to their rationalisations of why things are how they assume them to be.
Incidentally, I find Coyne’s book well-written and not at all polemical as might be expected if one assumed Feser’s review was at all accurate.
Just looking in quickly as I’m out all day. A little restating might be in order.
The main point I have been making, starting with the OP, might be summarized as a decision matrix. Two approaches at understanding: the scientific approach, the philosophical approach. Two challenges: understanding how the universe (or bits of it) works, why there is a universe at all.
I’ll pick up on accusations of “pretending” and “quoteming” later. This evening if I’m home early enough.
ETA: Perhaps I should mention another set of buffers; the limits set by the capacity of the human intellect for understanding.
OK, I see.
Generally, I would have said that teleology (not teleonomy) has already been naturalized – or more accurately, a successful eliminativism vis teleology has already been accomplished, at least in biology. Darwin did it! So I don’t think we have a teleology problem at all. The teleology is only apparent.
Regarding expressing your statement in non-teleonomic language, I last night had written the following, but decided not to include it in my post to keep things simple:
“As an aside, I don’t think the causal story is ‘some aquatic animals sense fields because it helps them to locate prey and evade predators, thus enhancing their survival.’ I think it more accurate to say, ‘some aquatic animals sense electric fields because because similar heritable sensitivity in their forebears enhanced their survival and reproductive success, and was therefore selected for.'”
It’s a Millikanesque way of identifying function (and teleonomy) with features that drove selection (e.g. she would say that the function of hearts is to pump blood rather than make a thumping sound because the former, not the latter, had bearing on survival and reproduction). The causal story (and free floating rationale) lies in the evolutionary past, not in living individuals. The teleonomic way of expressing it seems more natural/less awkward, but I’m wondering if the difference puts a finger on something causal (beyond what Millikan suggests), or if it appeals because purpose-talk is so congenial to our ears.
There’s a quiet but interesting debate going on in philosophy about whether Darwinism allows us to eliminate teleology (Rosenberg) or naturalize it (Dennett, Millikan). I think that Dennett and Millikan are right but that it is necessary (and possible) to naturalize talk of goals and not just functions. The reason for this has everything to do with how we specify what a proper function is:
This means that we shouldn’t dismiss teleology or talk about goals out of a misplaced allegiance to the Epicureanization of Darwinism led by Jacques Monod and popularized by Richard Dawkins. Instead we should recognize the deep affinity between Darwin and Aristotle on the immanent normativity of life itself. This is neither mystical nor allowing the supernatural in through the back door.
RB,
I think it’s the latter. But something similar is going on when we explain an agent’s actions in terms of purpose.
As a physicalist, I think that both phenomena — the evolution of adaptive features and the purposive actions of agents — can be fully explained in physical terms. If you agree, that leaves us with a few options that I can see. In each case, we can
1) take the eliminativist approach, and affirm that the physical explanation is the only correct one, and that purposes aren’t real;
2) regard the causal and purposive explanations as two sides of the same coin, which is my approach;
3) argue that purposes emerge (in the strong sense) from the physical; or
4) posit that purposive and physical causes are distinct and operate simultaneously (which leads to the overdetermination problem you mentioned earlier).
#3 and #4 overlap somewhat.
If I’ve triangulated your position correctly, you are an eliminativist with respect to purpose in evolution but not with respect to purpose in intentional agents. I take the “two sides of the same coin” approach to both, seeing purposive explanations as referring to the same underlying phenomena as the physical explanations, but at a different level of abstraction.
Assuming I’ve understood you correctly, why are you willing to see genuine purpose in agents, but not in evolution, if both phenomena can (in principle) be fully explained in physical terms?
I’m inclined to a position closer to yours than that – with a twist. While more or less a physicalist, probably in a sense close to yours vis two sides of the same coin, I also posit that the praxis of representing both others’ and one’s own actions and dispositions in terms of theory of mind/mental/intentional states (beliefs, desires, etc.) gives such an effective representational shorthand, and such an easily deployed and shared representational coin for cooperative interaction, that it has become an indispensable human social cognitive adaptation, an adaptation with both evolutionary and cultural origins. This adaptation is as essential to human functioning as flight is to birds. As a praxis and an adaptation, rather than as a prototheory of human causality, it is neither right or wrong. Contemporary human beings are largely obligately social and are incapable of interacting without construing one another in this way. As such, it’s not going away any time soon.
That’s a test for the supernatural – it doesn’t need a door.
I don’t think anyone else has been disagreeing in the sense of trying to win a debate.
RB,
I would say we are taking advantage of that same adaptation when we use purposive language in our evolutionary explanations. It’s simply easier to think about evolution in purposive terms, and there’s little harm in it as long as we keep in mind that the purposes are free-floating rationales, independent of any mind.
Which brings me back to my earlier point. We can think about both agents and evolution in terms of purpose, but intentionality is a factor only when we’re speaking of agents. That’s why I think the issue of naturalizing purpose is central, and that naturalizing intentionality is only a means to that end in some circumstances.
The “Quote in Reply” function is a great tool for quote-mining.
Why not ignore them?
Indeed. Too many people think talk of teleology is God talk.
I bet you do too, actually. 🙂
At least that’s the hypothesis I have regarding why you insist on limiting teleology to living organisms.
I restrict teleology to living organisms because I don’t see what descriptive purchase or explanatory significance it has in statistical mechanics, fluid dynamics, geomorphology, thermodynamics, or fundamental physics (general relativity, quantum mechanics, or any successor theory).
If you have an argument for how teleology is useful in physics or chemistry, I’ll consider it.
You should consider it because physics and chemistry would not be possible without it.
Our understanding of physics and chemistry would not be possible without our distinctive kinds of normative awareness. But that doesn’t mean that physical and chemical patterns & regularities themselves depend on any kind of normativity for their existence, because laws aren’t norms.
We are aware of norms. Who ever claimed otherwise. Our understanding of physics and chemistry would not be possible without norms susceptible to “our distinctive kinds of normative awareness.” However, these norms exist in spite of our awareness of them.
We could not become aware of these norms if they were not norms that had an independent existence of our awareness of them. The fact that you accept teleology in all organisms demonstrates that awareness of norms is unrelated to human concepts of norms.
Teleology exists. Life depends on it.
Patterns and regularities are patterns and regularities because they are norms. Laws may not be norms, but it seems to me that the codification of a norm is what is meant by a law. If you take the position that laws are descriptive, then what do they describe, if not norms?
My understanding of “normative” is that it implies value judgments, concerning goals, motivations, preferences, and beliefs about how things ought to be. If I say “income distribution is unfair” or “we’d all be better off if we were more honest”, these are normative statements.
However, how physics and chemistry work is independent of our understanding of how they work. Our understanding is simply not necessary for them to work.
Mung,
It seems to me as if your position depends on a conflation of laws (which describe physical and chemical regularities) and norms (which are distinctive of living things, though the norms of rational agehrs are different from those of all other kinds of living thing).
I’ll explain later why I think this conflation is a mistake and hence why there is no abiotic normativity.
It also follows from this that our awareness of distinctively rational norms, our awareness of merely biological norms, and our awareness of physico-chemical laws put the biological sciences in a separate category from both the humanities/social sciences and from other natural sciences.
I think there is a terminology problem here. Human laws are normative, because they are statements about how things ought to be, how we would like them to be, how we think people ought to behave, etc. Physical “laws” are not normative in this sense. A statement like F=ma is not normative.
F=ma is how things ought to be.
Naturalized teleology huh?
So this is how you can eliminate the need for anything supernatural, by coming with a clever phrase which has zero explanatory power?
“Nature did it, get it? Please don’t ask how!”
Its emergent!
In my opinion this is the really shitty part of evolutionary theory these days. Id’ists all along have been arguing that the random accidental path of nature doesn’t seem to be correct, and that rather there appears to be a teleology in nature that strives towards a goal, instead of accidentally stumbling upon one. This of course points toward a purpose.
Now that the IDists are winning this argument, what does the evolution side do? They awkwardly are forced to acknowledge the teleology, but in order to save their world view, they call it “emergent teleology” “naturalized teleology”, “magical somehow with a reason teleology”.
What a fucking cop-out, and what an oxymoron. Teleology literally means evidence of design or purpose in nature. Now they want to come up with a term which means purpose without a purpose. Utter nonsense.
Evolutionists are trapped, so they stand with their pants down and say…”Nature did it!” What the fuck is that?
Right over phoodoo’s head.
keiths,
Naturalized teleology is over everyone’s head Keiths. No one knows what the heck that is.
Keith, (or anyone else who cares to answer): When I say to myself, “I ought to get up of the couch and do something”, what causes various groups of neurons to fire accompanied by the appropriate muscle movements? What happens between my volition and the physical processes that allow me to move? Telekinesis or what?
Laws of physics (such as that one, or the Boyle-Charles law, etc.) specify how things would be like under certain conditions, not what they should or ought to be. The idea that laws are norms is a confusion between different kinds of modality.
CharlieM,
That question can never be answered if one believes in Darwinian evolution. There can be no such thing as your “will” do to something, if all you are is a biological bag of chemicals. Your will is an illusion, because everything that you are is inside that bag, and thus, by making any decision, you are changing what it is that is inside that bag of chemicals. So the you that was there before you decided to get up off the couch would be a different you then the one after you got up off the couch. Every action must by definition, change that arrangement of that bag of chemicals. The you before the decision and the you after the decision are not the same entity, so how can one have free will, then give that free will to the other. Whose free will was it?
Everything you do must be a result of what state those chemicals are in at any given time. There is no choice. There is no “you” which is separate from those chemical states, which will decide what those chemical states will do..
Of course KN and the like will try to baffle people with terms like “emergence” and “natural teleology” but that has no meaning. Either you are the bag of chemicals and nothing more, or your are indeed something more. Emergence does nothing to explain what you are other then the chemicals. Its a hocus pocus term that tries to rationalize something, without giving any explanation of the rationale. Just say a word, and they pretend they are let off the hook for dealing with the dilemma of are you something apart from the bag of chemicals.
A bag of chemicals can’t change itself, it is stuck doing what the bag of chemicals makes it do.
Of course we all know that is not true, but that is all materialists are left with. That and the hocus pocus term, emergence. Philosophy at its worst.
I’d suggest Mung’s example of
is a mathematical model of an observation. And Newton’s laws of motion have proved enduringly useful and are still used for space launches but are not accurate enough enough for GPS.
I think the hard part of the question resides in how the human brain functions and how the thinking, decision-making and so on is supported in brain tissue. It’s a problem that should be amenable to scientific study, in that I would call it a “how” rather than a “why” question.
Why not, in principle? I’m pretty sure science has as yet no detailed explanation of how the brain works but I see no intrinsic barrier to future research.
“Will” is a map word. The territory is mostly unexplored.
I can’t quite tell from the forgoing exchange if you regard “purpose” in evolution as contributing something causal above and beyond selectionist and other a-purposeful evolutionary processes, or regard it as a congenial linguistic placeholder for phenomena that are not actually purposive. Seems to me that for “purpose” and “goals” to be more than a placeholder, but actually causal, then representation (of those purposes and goals) has to be, or has to have been, operative either within the organism or within the evolutionary process that brought the organism into being. Representation is an intentional phenomenon – perhaps the definition of an intentional state is a state of affairs that represents something other than itself.
Although minds/agency always entail intentionality, does it necessarily follow that all intentionality entails minds/agency? (Perhaps it does.)
And perhaps an implication of asserting the causal reality of Dennett’s free floating rationales is that free floating intentionality also occurs.
We all recognize objects that convey “derived intentionality”; perhaps evolution generates something akin to derived intentionality without ever instantiating original intentionality. After all, life emerged from and is composed of the non-living, and consciousness from the non-conscious. Why not intentionality from processes that are themselves not characterized by intentionality?
Just thinking aloud.
CharlieM,
The short answer is “physics”. Your brain progresses through a series of states, each of which is physically determined by the prior state plus the influence of the environment (and any inherent quantum randomness).
It’s only if you posit the existence of a ghostly will, separate from the body, that the need for telekinesis arises. Physicalism avoids that problem.
If you see the will as separate from the body, how does it “reach in” and twiddle with the neurons, causing you to get up from the couch?
I don’t understand why not. You seem to be arguing that if the process is not understood right down at the chemical level, it must be magic. This is classical god of the gaps.
Not an illusion, but a subjective appreciation of neurological processes. Consciousness, will, etc. are what the brain does, from the internal perspective of that brain. It’s not magic.
I am of the firm conviction that this is indeed the case. On my view, there is original intentionality (in one important sense of the term), and it is the result of biological evolution.
The problem I’m working on now is how to clarify the distinction between the kind of embodied coping that characterizes sentient animals generally and the kind of “individual intentionality” that Tomasello ascribes to great apes. Tomasello argues that human culture (and cognition) depend on a kind of “shared intentionality” (he gets this term from Searle, but so far as I can tell, nothing of substance depends on Searle — which is good, because Searle is a mess!).
But Tomasello also argues that collective or shared intentionality has an evolutionary precursor in a kind of “individual intentionality” that he ascribes to the great apes. Tomasello’s concept of individual intentionality is drawn from Okent’s Rational Animals, which Rouse sympathetically criticizes in his Articulating the World (which I just finished reading last night).
So now I’m trying to piece together what a Okrent/Tomasello response to Rouse could look like.
There’s no substitute for observation. I’m sure I’ve pushed Frans de Waal’s TED talk before but I’m not sure if you found time to watch. Here is the link again.
By the way, it was suggested above that I support “emergentism”. This is not the case. I used to be somewhat in favor of it, but no longer.
The very concept of “emergence” supposes that we can distinguish between the ground-floor of reality — what is the non-emergent or basic or fundamental — and the other parts, the parts that are emergent with regard to the non-emergent. But I simply do not think that we can make this distinction. I don’t think that reality has any privileged or fundamental or basic component or dimension or whatever.
This is what I’m not a materialist or a physicalist. I don’t think it makes sense to say that the entities characterized by fundamental physics are “more real” or “more basic” than the entities characterized by ecology or by neuroscience. That is, I don’t think that “more basic” or “more real” or “emergent” is a philosophically adequate way of understanding how the different sciences are related to one another.
I also think that metaphysics should be accountable to scientific theories and practices as much as possible, because in scientific practices our discursive practices are explicitly and deliberately held accountable to how objects disclose themselves through our experimental interactions with them. In other words, scientific practices have to be at work in any metaphysical speculation that isn’t going to collapse into mere myth or fantasy.
One of my major qualms about “emergence” is that it comes out of the neo-scholastic, a prioristic, intuition-driven approach to metaphysics that now dominates contemporary analytic metaphysics. That kind of metaphysics is not grounded in a coherent epistemology that explains how we have the sort of access to reality that the metaphysics tells us that we have.
In other words: although all metaphysics should be constrained by scientific practices as much as possible, I don’t think that any specific branch of science has metaphysical priority over any other — and so fundamental physics does not have metaphysical priority over ecology or neuroscience.
And the constraint that scientific practices have on metaphysics can be more or less loose. We start off with the manifest image — a conception of ourselves as thinkers, as agents, as beings who can be held responsible to ourselves and to others for what we believe and do. The task of the metaphysician is to inquire into how much of that manifest image can be accounted for in terms of phenomena as disclosed by scientific practices. And that is an ongoing process, because science is continually evolving (and so too is our conception of science).
I myself do not think that what we get, from taking science seriously, undermines our self-conception as beings who can be held responsible to ourselves and to others for what we believe and do. It can and does undermine a specific mythological conception of those abilities.
RB,
Something in between, consistent with my “two sides of the same coin” approach.
When we take the teleological stance with respect to our fellow humans, we see them as acting to fulfill their purposes/intentions. Yet we can also view them as collections of countless atoms, with each atom obeying the laws of physics in a blind and purposeless manner. To me, these are two ways of modeling the same underlying phenomena, just at vastly different levels of abstraction. The teleological view invokes no causality that isn’t there in the low-level ateleological model — it’s just a restatement of that causality in more abstract terms.
I apply the same general approach to evolution. We can take a teleological stance toward it, seeing it as a process that fulfills certain free-floating rationales, or we can view it as just another case where large collections of atoms change state according to the purposeless laws of physics. (And of course we can also apply intermediate levels of abstraction.) The underlying phenomena are the same, so no independent causality is being introduced at the higher levels of abstraction. As for the agent case, we are simply restating that causality at a higher level of abstraction.
More later in response to the rest of your interesting comment.
keiths,
I’m fine with the idea that the different stances play different explanatory roles, and I would further stress that each stance is — to be a real stance — is a causally efficacious strategy of dealing with real patterns. But it seems to me as if you want to say that the physical stance is somehow more real than other stances that one could take. Is that your view? If so, why do you think so?
KN,
No, I think they’re equally real — hence my “two sides of the same coin” analogy.
However, I do see the physical as being more fundamental. Teleology supervenes on physics, not the other way around.
Flint,
Does the chemical state of the brain decide what the brain does?
If so, who has the free will?
Does this mean you take as your starting point the brain inside your head? In other words the first two words you write are just shorthand for “This brain thinks”. Is the self nothing but an effect produced by brain chemistry?
I agree that there are physical processes within the brain which correlate with my decision to move, and it is a perfectly reasonable scientific endeavour to study “how” this all works. But when I ask about the relationship between my volition and the physical processes inside my head, I take as my starting point my “I”, let’s call it my ego. I begin with my sense of self, my ego, which, to begin with, I feel as separate from the rest of the world around me. Now I do not believe that the world that I peceive through my senses consists of an objective reality imprinted as a representation on my inner world. Nor do I believe that there is an unobtainable Kantian “world in itself” hidden behind the world that enters through my senses.
I believe that the world that we perceive entering through our senses is subjective and it is through thinking that we turn it into objective reality. We look out of the window and see a tree. What we see depends on our position and visual capability and so we cannot say that what we see is something objective. However when we apply our thinking to the tree, we understand its life from beginning to end, how it came to be, its life history. This is something our physical senses cannot give us, with regards to them it is supersensible. But by using our brain as a sense organ we reconnect reality into an objective unity. Our thinking apparatus turns the supersensible into the sensible.
I believe that when I decide to move, the process is initiated by my ego and my brain activity is a consequence of this not a cause. At our present stage of evolution we normally gain the ability to control certain bodily movements by muscle control, but we cannot volutarily control movement of our heart nor the smooth muscles.At the moment we are asleep to the vast majority of processes taking place within us, but I believe this will change in the future.
The fundamental character of we humans as organisms is in the unity of the ego. It is not in the individual atoms and molecules of our physical bodies. Within the individual these are ephemeral, ever changing entities that the body uses to maintain its form.
The ego is more permanent and partakes more in reality than the physical substance of our bodies.
Yes, you’ve got it in one!
No. Ever been put under general anesthesia? It’s not at all like dreaming, it’s like a switch was thrown. Your brain is OFF, so your self and your ego are also.
CharlieM:
Hence my earlier question:
It seems that it’s you, not I, who are invoking telekinesis.
I see nothing ghostly about the will. Thinking, feeling and willing are things I experience directly and it is because of the will’s reality that I am typing these words. Brain processes and synaptic interactions on the other hand, of them I have no direct empirical experience.
It is you who, if you want to attribute any sort of reality to your thinking, willing self, needs to justify its emergence out of your bodily processes. Otherwise you are just an illusion created by physics and chemistry. And why would a bunch of chemicals be interested in discussing the mysteries of life?
Why would matter ponder the existence of its own being? According to naturalistic evolutionists bacteria are the most successful organisms around and I’m sure they have no need of doing so.
CharlieM,
You didn’t answer my question:
I think (heh) that the structure and function of the brain would need to be fully explored and understood before we need to start looking elsewhere for explanations of human cognition. Progress is being made both from bottom-up (biochemistry of neurons etc) and top-down (MRI scanning etc). As Flint remarks, there is an undeniable link between brain activity and cognition so speculation about the brain being not sufficient as the organ containing our cognitive abilities and positing immaterial “mind” is premature.
I see johnnyb has a book featured in an article at Uncommon Descent.
A quote from his book seems to bear somewhat upon the subject of the OP:
I’m sure Alan can answer for himself.
It doesn’t matter if you are unconscious during sleep or through a general anaesthetic, your ego returns when you wake up. It is not renewed as a blank slate every morning, it is a constant thread running through your life from the time when you first became self-conscious as a child. You do not remember all of your experiences throughout this time, but, barring abnormalities, you know it was you who had these experiences.
I don’t see the will as separate from the body. I see myself as a unified whole; body, soul and spirit.