257 thoughts on “Is biology reducible to physics?”

1. Tyrone Biggins:

   Maybe at a god’s eye perspective these cruder aspects would flow from the purely informatic bottom level, being identical to it, but as humans it seems our model of biology will always be most rich if its analysis includes data specifically pertinent to concepts like populations, fitness, kin selection, etc.

   Hi Tyrone,

   Welcome to TSZ.

   I agree with what you say above, which is why I’ve been stressing throughout the thread that I am talking about in-principle reduction, not in-practice reduction.

   Biology’s reducibility to physics is an interesting fact about the world even if we don’t actually attempt the full reduction.

2. Bruce,

   Dennett says Brandom grounds them in linguistic communities this way: One violates a norm by committing a social transgression. Norms are grounded by saying they are social transgressions. So original intentionality is a property of the community in that sense, not the individual.

   If Brandom grounds original intentionality in social norms, that has an odd consequence.

   Suppose I privately coin a new term to describe some aspect of my work. I use it thoughout my notes and in my thinking, but I haven’t yet shared it with anyone. By Brandom’s standards, my term doesn’t possess original intentionality!

3. keiths:

   If Brandom grounds original intentionality in social norms, that has an odd consequence.

   Suppose I privately coin a new term to describe some aspect of my work.I use it thoughout my notes and in my thinking, but I haven’t yet shared it with anyone.By Brandom’s standards, my term doesn’t possess original intentionality!

   Keith:
   Brandom wrote a 700 page book on this and then a shorter one with updated ideas.

   I was just trying to post my understanding of Dennett’s comments on Brandom.

   There is no way I know enough about Brandom to try to defend him. But I should say your example reminds me Wittgenstein’s arguments against private language based on his theory of meaning depending on use in a community, and Brandom does start with Wittgenstein’s (as updated by Sellars) theory of meaning.

   However, Brandom adds further sophistication to try to overcome some of their deficiencies.

   More at SEP I imagine; I have also been looking at Lycan’s intro text on Phil of Meaning, if you are interested.

   ETA: I also left out a lot of the Dennett paper. For example, one of the subtleties is that Brandom thinks we cannot understand intentionality of individuals and then animals until we understand how intentionality works in a linguistic communities. But that does not mean he thinks animal intentionality does not exist and cannot be investigated once we have understand oritingal intentionality sources in linguistic communities.

   And of course, everything I say is my understanding of Dennett’s understanding of Brandom. I have not attempted any Brandom directly, not even his videos.

4. Bruce,

   Okay, I’ll keep in mind that your understanding of Brandom is third-hand.

   But if Brandom thinks that original intentionality derives from the linguistic community, then a single individual presumably doesn’t count as a linguistic community, and therefore my coined term doesn’t possess original intentionality.

   On the other hand, if a single individual did count as a linguistic community, then original intentionality would be grounded in individuals after all.

   So it seems more likely that Brandom doesn’t believe that individuals are linguistic communities unto themselves, which leaves the puzzle of my private coinage intact.

5. keiths:

   But if Brandom thinks that original intentionality derives from the linguistic community, then a single individual presumably doesn’t count as a linguistic community, and therefore my coined term doesn’t possess original intentionality.

   Keith:
   My quick, semi-educated answer is that yes, Wittgenstein says there cannot be a private language and I would suspect Brandom would agree. But I don’t know. What I do know is his answer would be nuanced and subtle and not something that would be deeply explainable or justifiably refutable in short blog posts. But what the hell, let me say my two bits anyway.

   I’d like to comment first on intentionality of an individual per se versus the intentionality of the representations or actions of an individual in their context. By the latter, I mean entities or events like people’s mental contents, word symbols and speech actions; bee dances; internal states of a two-bitser.

   I think one has to understand the two concepts together. It’s like consciousness. You can talk about whether an entity can be conscious in general or what specifically that entity is conscious of. Similar, you can talk about the nature of the intentionality of an individual, or you can talk about the meaning/intentionality of specific entities or actions of that individual in context. Those are two different things so we just need to keep them straight.

   When it comes to the intentionality of actions or representations, we need to have a way of separating what the action or representation is correctly about and what it is NOT about. Or what it means and what it does NOT mean. Or whether it is right or wrongly used. Such NORMS are needed to start to give a complete explanation of intentionality/meaning.

   Brandom says we answer the question of the source of norms by looking at linguistic communities. The norms start with how individuals are scored in conducting the game of giving reasons in communities. (I re-use those words as I don’t have a deep understanding as of yet of what such scorekeeping means, exactly). So we cannot talk about individual intentionality or the intentionality of an individuals actions or representations until we understand how linguistic communities set norms. Then we can extend that understanding to individuals in those communities and to non-linguistic communities and their members, at least in some limited sense.

   That was helpful to me to type. Hopefully it means something to you.

   Last post for today…

6. keiths:
   So it seems more likely that Brandom doesn’t believe that individuals are linguistic communities unto themselves, which leaves the puzzle of my private coinage intact.

   Keith:

   In googling around for more info on this, I found that you and KN had already had an exchange on the Dennett paper in a thread on norms/errors rather than intentionality.

   I’d forgotten about this. In re-reading your exchange with him on that thread, I found all of KN comments in that exchange helpful for me to understand the paper and background better,

7. phoodoo: Because fitness and survival are the same meaning fool

   Just saw this.

   Argumentum ad BA Barracus. Till him to “quit his jibba jabber”, also.