The standard design-theorist argument hinges on the assumption that there are three logically distinct kinds of explanation: chance, necessity, and design. (I say “explanation” rather than “cause” in order to avoid certain kinds of ambiguities we’ve seen worked out here in the past two weeks).
This basic idea — that there are these three logically distinct kinds of explanation — was first worked on by Plato, and from Plato it was transmitted to the Stoics (one can see the Stoics use this argument in their criticism of the Epicureans) and then it gets re-activated in the 18th-centuries following, such as in the Christian Stoicism of the Scottish and English Enlightenment, of which William Paley is a late representative. Henceforth I’ll call this distinction “the Platonic Trichotomy”
There are at least two different ways of criticizing the Platonic Trichotomy. One approach, much-favored by ultra-Darwinists, is to argue that unplanned heritable variation (“chance”) and natural selection (“necessity,” if natural selection is a “law” in the first place) together can produce the appearance of design. (Jacques Monod is a proponent of this view, and perhaps Dawkins is today.) The other approach, which I prefer, is to reject the entire Trichotomy.
To reject the Trichotomy is not to reject the idea that speciation is largely explained in terms of the feedback between variation and selection, but rather to reject the idea that this process is best conceptualized in terms of “chance” and “necessity.”
So what’s the alternative? What we would need here is a new concept of nature that is not beholden to any of the positions made possible with respect to the conceptual straitjacket imposed by the Trichotomy.
I figure folks, me at least, will have more time to read and comprehend tomorrow, but in the meantime, I just want to wish you Merry Christmas, Kantian Naturalist.
hotshoe,
Thank you, hotshoe — and a very Merry Christmas to you and yours!
As used by the ID people, the trichotomy becomes equivalent to a “god of the gaps” argument, because anything unexplained (any gap) is put in the design box.
I’m not sure what to say of “design”, because I don’t think there’s a good definition that people can agree on.
I do not see any basis at all for “necessity” being there. For sure, some scientific laws express necessary truths. But that is only because science has formulated its concepts so as to include analytic truths. Strictly speaking, analytic truths say nothing about reality. Rather, they are about how we formulate our accounts of reality. So analytic truths are not describing examples of necessity in the natural world.
QM seems to suggest that all material interactions are random in some sense. But it is not random with a uniform distribution. Rather, it can be random with highly skewed distributions. So the world is not homogeneous. It is lumpy. Biological organisms have found ways to exploit that lumpiness to their own benefit. If we want to call that exploitation “design”, then that would at least define the word. And it would leave all known examples of design as resulting from the action of biological systems.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of “intelligent design” if we understand “design” in that sense of biological systems exploiting the lumpiness that they find. That would leave evolution as the result self-design by the biological systems, intelligently redesigning themselves over time in an attempt to avoid extinction. Of course, the ID proponents reject that, but refuse to give a satisfactory definition of either “design” or “intelligent”.
You only “need” a new concept of nature if you admit that the chance/necessity concept fails, and if you have an a priori requirement that design/artifice not be allowed.
The converse is also true — one only “needs” the concept of design/artifice if one admits that the conjunction of chance and necessity is an inadequate explanation, and one has an a priori commitment to that conception of nature. If one rejects that conception of nature to begin with, then the corresponding “need” for design doesn’t arise.
In other words, the Platonic Trichotomy itself necessarily presupposes the Epicurean conception of nature as chance plus necessity — and it does that because Plato invented the Trichotomy in direct response to the rise of Democritean and Epicurean metaphysics, which did rely on a “disenchanted conception of nature”. If one starts off with a conception of nature from which all agency and purpose have been evacuated, then one will certainly need to find an alternative way of accommodating agency and purpose — and that’s exactly what the Trichotomy does by invoking “design”.
But my point here is that the Trichotomy is optional, and so too is the very Democritean/Epicurean metaphysics to which it is a response. There is no reason why our conception of nature should be held captive by ancient Greek atomism.
In connection with this, I’ve been taking a stronger and stronger interest over the years in the Romantic conception of nature and life, particularly as the Romantics influenced both the American pragmatists and the Frankfurt School. Lately I’ve been reading Stephen Talbott’s work (here), and I find it utterly fascinating. His criticisms of both ID and neo-Darwinism are fully in line with my own thinking on these matters.
Dawkins notwithstanding, I simply don’t get this “appearance of design” claim regarding life. Other than by conflating function with design, that is.
For Aristotle it is rather different, there is techne and there is physis, and these are readily distinguished. He did see teleology in life, to be sure, but in a way that actually fits reasonably well with Darwinian ideas, that organisms exist for themselves.
There are similarities between the results of techne and physis, but humans have rarely had any difficulty distinguishing the two. By now, of course, biology notes that life happens to exhibit evolutionary limits, rather than the design possibilities that would bypass those limits. Conceiving of life as designed has never led our understanding past the proximity of function (and has misled there at times), while evolution brings understanding to the limits of life’s functions.
Glen Davidson
I like this, but just to clarify and make sure I’m on the same page here — on this view, there is no necessity in nature at all — the necessity of physical laws arises from our decision to use particular concepts in particular ways. So “F=ma” holds because we’ve decided to only use the concept of “force” to mean “the product of mass and acceleration”, and that’s why “F=ma” is necessarily true.
It’s the “in some sense” that puzzles me here, partly because I’m fascinated by the possibility held out by Bohmian mechanics — a fully deterministic version of QM. But my grasp of the philosophy of quantum mechanics is based entirely on my casual reading of Hilary Putnam’s work on the subject.
I would think that the thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems is a more promising explanation of the world’s lumpiness than QM — though a fully complete physics would have to unify the two.
In my terms, this would amount to explaining the agency and purposiveness of biological organisms in terms of how they are constituted by far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems and reconstitute themselves, moment to moment, by exploiting the features of such systems and deferring full payment on the thermodynamic bill — up until the thermodynamic bill must be paid in full, and the organism dies.
GlenDavidson,
Aristotelian teleology is teleology enough for me! And thank you for picking up on his distinction between techne (art) and physis (nature). Somewhere — in the Metaphysics, maybe? — Aristotle remarks that if beds were natural, little beds would grow from collapsed bed-frames. And Aristotelian teleology is not designed, because the Unmoved Mover — the Aristotelian deity — does not intervene in the natural world and does not originate the forms themselves. The unmoved mover is the final cause of all things by virtue of drawing all things to it, but its activity consists of being nothing other than thought thinking itself.
Yes, you’ve got it.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t think that the “Platonic Trichotomy” is a presupposition; rather, it’s based on the real-world differences between things we actually experience in life. We experience sets of things that behave regularly and predictably and classify them under the term “necessity” or “physical law”. We experience sets of things that appear to be random and unpredictable, which we classify as “chance”. We also experience that which doesn’t appear to be lawful or by chance; deliberate agency.
Also, it appears to be as impossible to imagine a 4th causal category as it is to imagine a 4th side of a triangle, which IMO carries with it profound implications. More profound implications can be found by imagining existence without one of those three causal categories; as far as I can tell, all three are required for individual, sentient, meaningful existence.
As a piece of phenomenology, yes — to some degree. We do experience the world (and its inhabitants, and ourselves) as containing some regions of existence that are regular and predictable, and others as random and unpredictable, and some as centers of agency, purpose, and value in their own right.
However, we must be careful to do two different things here — firstly, in attending to the phenomena themselves being described, we have to suspend our theoretical and conceptual commitments, prejudices, theories, narratives, “ideologies”, etc. — in order to actually see nothing more or nor less than what we see. Secondly, once we have figured out how we actually experience the world, there is still the further question as to how to explain it. The different kinds of phenomenological description — or what I would call “logical spaces” — might or might not find satisfaction in an adequate explanation of what’s going on to generate those phenomena.
KN,
It seems to me that your are attempting to throw out the perfectly useful Platonic Trichotomy for no reason other than to avoid accepting design as a fundamental, necessary and distinct category of causation. So, it seems to me that it is your conceptual commitment against design that is causing you to seek out an alternative. You can hardly be “suspending your theoretical commitments” when it is exactly for your conceptual commitments that you are embarking on this quest in the first place.
Other than that it includes design, what’s the problem with the Platonic Trichotomy?
That it includes “design” isn’t the problem, but rather that it takes for granted that “chance” and “necessity” together exhaustively describe what is “natural” — that is the problem.
For then it turns out, if we begin by assuming that “nature” is the realm of “chance and necessity,” that agency and purpose aren’t immanently generated from within nature, but rather arise within nature only on account of having been imposed on nature from outside of it. The alternative I propose here — rejecting the entire Trichotomy — doesn’t reject our lived experience of agency (far from it!) but rather rejects the thought that agency and purpose cannot be explained in terms of nature itself, but must be introduced into nature from outside of it. For the only way we get the conclusion that agency and purpose cannot be explained in terms of nature itself is by assuming that nature itself is properly and exhaustively described by chance and necessity.
In other words, it is only only we assume a chance-and-necessity conception of nature to begin with that we would then need to appeal to anything outside of nature — to Design — in order to explain the emergence of agency and purpose within nature.
I know you’re trying to convict me of being the one wearing ideological blinders, but in this case, I think the shoe is on the other foot.
I don’t think so. Force is not defined to mean “the product of mass and acceleration.” A (conservative) force is defined as the gradient (the spatial derivative) of energy. When applied to an object possessing inertia, a force generates an acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the acceleration, hence ma = F. In other circumstances (e.g., fast spinning objects), a force generates velocity, rather than acceleration.
olegt,
On the details, I happily defer to people whose grasp of high-school physics is better than mine — I’m a humanities nerd, much happier with texts than equations. (Also, my high-school physics teacher was an incompetent alcoholic, but anyway.)
But I don’t think this criticism affects the more basic philosophical point, which is that the necessity lies in how we’ve decided to set up the relations between our concepts, rather than in nature itself. Or do you see it otherwise?
It has always amazed me how philosophers can talk about science without really understanding it.
I think the point is really that F=ma is an empirical relationship. “Force” was experienced and known before Newton’s famous equation, and so were mass and acceleration. Newton noted the relationship between all three. Later, someone else came up with E=1/2mv^2. Why not a directly proportionate equation like F=ma? Well, because that’s how it actually comes out to be, energy goes up as the square of velocity. “E,” energy, might not have been quite as obvious a concept as “F,” force, would have been prior to coming up with the equations, but certainly it wasn’t just one side of an equation, it was a measurable, observable quantity.
How does “necessity” come into this? I don’t know, there are various meanings of “necessity.” In one sense, of course you know the kinetic energy of your rocket once it hits a certain mass and a certain velocity, this is “necessarily” so (relativity figures in to make it fully accurate). But is there any “necessity” in the energy relationship, or in the force equation, as in, these could not have been otherwise? Not obviously so, physics has to deal with the fact that models of the universe have to be “fine-tuned” to end up with what we presently observe. One thing I’ve noticed with ID, a term like “necessity” is a slippery concept, although this is not unusual for such apologetics.
On the other topic, thanks for fleshing out what I wrote on Aristotle. As I recall, I know it rather better from his Physics than from his Metaphysics, although I never read either one clear through.
Glen Davidson
As far as I can tell, this term is not used in science all that much. One is more likely to encounter a different dichotomy: there are deterministic and stochastic processes. Newtonian equations of motion exemplify the former; Brownian motion the latter.
Of course, hand-waving only gets you so far. Often motion is a result of both deterministic and stochastic factors. The problem of gambler’s ruin involves an interplay of “necessity” (the odds are tipped in favor of the house) and “chance” (game outcomes are stochastic, even if not fair). You have to analyze this on a quantitative level. The devil is in the details.
I agree with that. However, people argue over it. There seems to be an undercurrent of essentialism, which I reject.
I looked at Wikipedia on force. And the Wikipedia entry seems to implicitly take force as a fixed (God given) concept, which people before Newton got wrong by ignoring the force of friction (for example). But I prefer to describe that as Newton changing our meaning of force, so that friction could now be considered a force rather than part of a natural tendency for things to slow down. And then, as I prefer to describe it, Einstein’s relativity required another change in our conception of force.
As a philosopher, I might say much the same about how scientists handle philosophy. Which is to say, gentle teasing is one thing, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so play nice!
Is this post an admission that “chance” was an explanation darwinist use, and then an admission that Lizzie was wrong when said to BA that they never did it?
Blas,
No, it isn’t.
What’s wrong with appealing to something “outside nature” to explain agency? It still sounds as if your search is agenda-driven.
Oh well! That´s funny. Then chance it is not an explanation, necessity is not enough and make humans a necessity of the reality, and if we admit the D word will became creationists in a cheap tuxido.
What we have then as an explanation?
Evolution itself. We found god. The uncaused cause. Everything was made by Evolution and it will exist forever.
Yes, here at TSZ people worship Evolution(Lizzie`s version off course). The first commandment of his god is “Lizzie is always right no matter the facts.” The second is “If Lizzie is arguing against BA you have to use every argument to defend her”.
I wouldn’t say that anything is wrong with “appealing to something ‘outside nature’ to explain agency”!
I would say that it is optional, and that the design argument relies (rather uncritically) on a particular conception of nature as “disenchanted” — where nature in itself is pictured as bereft of agency or purpose, and powerless to generate agency all by itself. We could say that the disenchanted conception of nature stipulates that nature is not intrinsically biogenic or bio-generative. By contrast, on the Romantic conception of nature that I’m appealing to here, there is a biogenerative or biogenic impulse inherent in nature as such.
Is that supposed to be an objection? If so, I’m not clear on what it is.
It only “explains” in the same way that “design is a mechanism”.
Just pushes the problem back one remove is all. If that makes you happy, go for it…
That is pantheism, ver popular during the eighteen century. Probably the most popular mataphysical position at all in any time, as chinese animism, buddism, african animsm and american religions are all variants of pantheism.
Blas,
My post here has nothing to do with what Lizzie was or wasn’t arguing. She’s talking about correct scientific methodology; I’m talking about speculative metaphysics.
KN said:
I said:
KN said:
It doesn’t sound to me that you are “suspend[ing] [y]our theoretical and conceptual commitments, prejudices, theories, narratives, “ideologies”, “…”, but rather attempting to create another way of conceptualizing nature in order to serve your prejudice/commitment/narrative that design doesn’t come from outside nature.
Yes, my view is definitely pantheistic. Elsewhere (in response to Gregory, a few days ago) I propose the term “evolutionary pantheism” for my bit of metaphysical speculation. How much difference there is between pantheism and animism is a side-question; I’m quite strongly drawn to both. Not sure about how pantheistic Buddhism is, but apart from that, yes, it’s a long tradition with ancient, Eastern, and Western versions.
No KN, Lizzie said this in his post about the topic:
“So can we please jettison this canard that “Darwinists” propose chance either as as an explanation for the complexity of life”
That it is not a th correct scientific metodology. That is a metaphysical affirmation that is wrong, and Lizzie when confronted hidede his error behind the definition of “null hypothesis”.
Ah, I see what you mean — thank you, that’s helpful.
I’m not proposing a biogenerative, Romantic conception of nature — nature as not disenchanted — as a straightforward description of our experience of nature. So there is an implicit distinction — now made explicit! — rather a mere conflation.
In other words, there’s the phenomenological description — how we experience nature — and then there’s the metaphysical speculation — how we articulate and explain what we experience. There’s a disjuncture or break between those two different enterprises. (And then there’s natural science, which can mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics — though surely art and poetry also mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics!)
Where is “outside nature”? What, besides “design” might come from it?
I also wonder how something “outside” nature gets inside nature…
Pedant,
http://antievolution.org/aebb-archive/aebbarchive_a_positive_testable_theory_of_intelligent_design_t4315.html
OMagain,
That’s a lovely essay by The Reciprocator.
I had the feeling that I wasn’t the first to ask such questions.
The resounding silence in response speaks volumes.
“The standard design-theorist argument…”
Is this terminology supposed to have something to do with ‘Intelligent Design’ theory (IDT)? I’d guess that 97% – 99% of people who openly call themselves ‘design theorists’ (which numbers in the 1000s) reject IDT and the IDM.
KN seems to be jumbling categories or just doesn’t write carefully about who specifically he is referring to in this case.
Case in point: I was at a conference on ‘design’ in a room full of ‘design theorists’ (and some of whom were at least people interested in discussing ‘design,’ by which they and we meant lowercase ‘design’ by human beings), almost all of whom laughed loudly at the notion that IDT anywhere near represented their views. Gladly I was laughing with them, not in spite of them…
Kantian Naturalist,
I find your proposition interesting because it’s essentially what my first two books were about, and what I went through for several years – tearing down all preconceptions, then looking at the world as freshly as possible and accounting for what I actually experience – not how others told me to interpret that experience. For years I kept finding hidden assumptions and models that I didn’t even realize were such – I thought they were reality, but they were just assumptions. l also found very deep and ingrained expectations about the world that just couldn’t be sustained.
For example, one thing I very thought and wanted to be true of my experience was some kind of reciprocity – that if you treat others well, they will generally treat you well – some kind of informal karma system. What I found out (at least in my experience) is that there simply is no such system in place. The worse I treated others, the better they responded to me. What I did to the world, and to others, had no apparent correlation to how the world treated me.
I don’t know how far you plan on going, but I went so far as to throw out all 2nd hand and 3rd party information. No philosophy books, no science books, no reports, nothing that would try to tell me what the world was and how it worked – I defined it all as belief, and defined “knowledge” as my actual, raw experience. The only things I accepted as knowledge, to begin my quest, was what I actually experienced.
Everything else was someone else’s theory, belief or opinion.
The “chance/necessity” concept does fail, and always has. Chance, conceived of as a causal factor, breaks down when you go to lower levels of explanation. A best it’s a high-level explanatory concept; at worst it’s simply incoherent.
But there is no need to “disallow” design or intention. Clearly many things are caused by intentional agents. But again, it’s a high-level explanatory concept, although unlike “chance”, it has actual explanatory power, whereas “chance” pretty well always reduces to “stuff we didn’t model”.
Interesting. The flaw, as I see it, in your idea, is that “raw experience”, I suggest, is itself an incoherent concept. I would argue that all experience is cooked, however lightly broiled.
I have no idea what you mean here, Blas. But the definition of a null hypothesis doesn’t “hide” anything – on the contrary, testing a workable null hypothesis forces you to be explicit.
“Chance” is no different than offering “luck” as a meaningless causal factor. There is no force or agency named “luck” that makes things happen. “Good luck” is merely what we call the result of a stochastic process that benefits us. “Bad luck” is the opposite result.
Can you see a homicide detective concluding in his report “the victim died of bad luck”?
The Titanic didn’t sink from “chance” or “luck”. The Titanic sank from a collision with an iceberg.
Evolution wasn’t caused by either “chance” or “luck”.
In general, that seems right to me. My only qualm there is that, if there’s no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between conceptualization and experience — if all experience is conceptually inflected or affected — then I don’t even if even “lightly broiled” vs. “raw” experience makes sense. The question here would be whether there is a non-conceptual aspect or component to experience at all. Phenomenology says yes, but there are other views which strongly indicate that the answer is no. I’m still working through this issue for my book.
Probably the same way a tailor designs a suit and, seeing as there a party to attend, promptly puts the suit on one leg at a time.
Or maybe the famous chef, that when he whips up a signature dish, the consumer, not even needing to observe the artist in action goes ‘Oh wow, I love ‘his’ stew.
The chef is without doubt ‘in’ that dish.
No magic here.
Well I will express my idea as clear as I can. You made a mistake saying that:
“So can we please jettison this canard that “Darwinists” propose chance either as as an explanation for the complexity of life”
Because that claim is false. I provided examples of that.
Instead of recognize your error, as usual, you started to debate about a statistical argument of what is a null hypotesis.
Yes, therefore ID. That’s actually among the more fleshed out proposals for how the designer works. You’ve never seen him but you know his “signature”.
Signature in the cell indeed. More like a “Michael Winner” style added extra to the dish.
This is a bit off topic, but not too much, since the issue is in part philosophical.
First, defining force as a gradient of (potential) energy is no better than defining it from Newton’s second law. One reason is that this only applies to conservative forces, thereby excluding things like friction, inelastic deformation, etc. The other reason is that this relation is just a Lagrangian equivalent of Newton’s second law in the case of conservative forces, so it’s really the same thing.
So how should we define force? The answer is not so simple, as this (as usual, excellent and very accessible) discussion in Feynman’s Lectures argues: What is a force? Thinking about it, one gets the impression that force is a kind of a crutch, a middleman that could be factored out of the description of interactions. And in fact, force has been factored out in some reformulations of classical mechanics, as well as in the more advanced formulations of fundamental physics.
As far as “necessity” is concerned, I think what is meant here is nothing more than nomological necessity, i.e. an inevitable outcome of the action of natural laws (whatever that might mean). Accident then is an underdetermined event, either due to a stochastic law or no law at all.
The third component of the trichotomy, “design,” comes from the traditional assumption that agent-causation is exempt from the natural law.
William J Murray,
Like many ID supporters, you take for granted that agency cannot be explained in terms of chance and necessity. Several of us have explained (and explained, and explained) to you that free will of the kind you propose — libertarian free will — is logically incoherent.
To the extent that an agent’s deliberate action is determined by its nature and its environment, it is necessary. To the extent that it isn’t, it is due to chance. A third category makes no sense.
This holds even if agency, despite all the evidence to date, turns out to be a nonphysical phenomenon.
Doesn´t all this stuff started with Lizzie saying that “chance” isn´t an explanation and never ever a darwinist used chance as an explanation?
I think there is one member that has to apologize with BA.