In the ‘Moderation’ thread, William J Murray tried to make a case for ideological bias among evolutionary scientists by referencing a 2006 Gil Dodgen post, in which numerous authors emphasise the lack of teleology within the evolutionary process. I thought this might merit its own OP.
I disagree that authors are showing a metaphysical bias by arguing against teleology. I wrote
Evolutionary processes, conventionally defined (ie, variations and their changes in frequency due to differential survival and reproduction), do not have goals. If there IS an entity with goals that is also directing, that’s as may be, but the processes of evolution carry on regardless when it isn’t. It is important to erase the notion of teleology from a student’s mind in respect of evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, and most of those quotes appear to have that aim. Organisms don’t, on the best evidence available, direct their own evolution.
To which WJM made the somewhat surprising rejoinder: “how do you know this”? Of course the simple answer is that I qualified my statement ‘on the best evidence available’ – I didn’t claim to know it. But there is a broader question. Is there any sense in which evolutionary processes could, even in principle, be teleological? I’d say not. You have a disparate collection of competing entities. Regardless whether there is a supervening entity doing some directing, the process of differential survival/reproduction/migration cannot itself have goals.
An example of evolution in action: the Chemostat.
The operator of a chemostat has a goal – often, to create a pure cell line. The process by which this is achieved is by simultaneous addition and removal of medium, which causes purification by random sampling, which is evolution (a form of genetic drift). How can that process have a goal? There is no collusion between the cells in the original medium to vote one to be the sole ancestor of all survivors. How do I know this? That would be a pretty daft question. I think it would be incumbent on the proponent to rule it in, rather than for me to rule it out.
I have no idea what that would even mean.
At one time you started arguing about heliocentrism as a property, when we had been discussing it as a theory of the solar system. What does it mean to “defend my claims” against that sort of nonsense?
Neil,
Here’s how it works, ideally:
Suppose Nick makes a statement that Kevin disagrees with. Kevin expresses his disagreement and provides his reasons. Nick, if he possesses the “thoughtful discussion” mindset, will look at Kevin’s reasons for disagreeing and ponder them.
If he thinks Kevin is correct, he’ll say so and retract the disputed statement. If he thinks Kevin is wrong, he’ll say so and express his reasons for disagreeing with Kevin’s criticisms. This works best if Nick quotes specific statements of Kevin’s and then gives his reasons for disagreeing.
The ball is then in Kevin’s court. If he thinks Nick is right, he’ll retract his criticism. If he thinks Nick is wrong, he’ll say so and provide his reasons. As above, this works best if Kevin quotes specific statements of Nick’s and then gives his reasons for disagreeing.
The exchanges continue this way until the issues are resolved or the participants agree to disagree. (Remember, I said that this is how it works ideally.)
If at any point either Kevin or Nick is confused about what the other person means, he can of course ask for clarification.
Want to give it a try? Here is a summary of my criticisms. Do you agree with them? If not, what specifically do you disagree with, and why? Provide quotes first, and then explain why you disagree with what is stated in the quotes.
Neil,
It’s actually quite simple, Neil. Think of it this way. Heliocentrism (the theory) is correct if our solar system exhibits heliocentrism (the property). The evidence shows that the solar system exhibits the property of heliocentrism, so we conclude that heliocentrism (the theory) is correct.
The solar system does not exhibit the property of geocentrism, so we conclude that geocentrism (the theory) is incorrect. Galileo was right!
Note that this is true regardless of the coordinate system you use. Geocentrism remains a crackpot idea even when expressed in a heliocentric coordinate system. Gravity doesn’t “care” about coordinate systems. It cares about mass and distance.
Kantian Naturalist,
There must be some kind of distinction between ‘contributing to the likelihood that there will still be squirrels/oaks’ and ‘being planned’, surely? A squirrel does not formulate a plan to continue its existence; it says (in squirrel-speak) “ha, food!”. Eating is ‘for’ survival, but it is not planned by the survivor – particularly in those organisms lacking a nervous system.
An oak arises because the cells in the acorn replicate and multiply in a particular manner. The cells cohere and we perceive a greater organism. But early in evolution, when cells were presumably free-living, incipient multicellularity would have involved some fairly loose clumping. By simple replication, a free-living cell increases the likelihood of residence of its genome in the world, by gaining a copy. But by clumping daughter cells together in a somatic system, it increases the likelihood of residence of that genome by a different pathway – multicellular somas, which can be protective, locomotory, nutritional etc, or a combination. Some cells remained free-living, others built more and more elaborate somas. We have a strong tendency, this far down the evolutionary path, to invert the relationship – to say that germ cells are ‘for’ the continuance of somas. After all, we are mostly soma, and we think we’re what it’s all about. But at what point in the probable continuum did that switch take place? And, where speciation and divergence occur, are they all ends?
Even leaving aside the question of intent, theres a problem with referring to a point in a perpetual, changing and branching cycle as a telos, I think.
So the same ridiculous bullshit.
Let’s take an example:
That’s your bare assertion. You provided zero evidence in support of that assertion.
What can be asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence.
Maybe you should try to actually understand what I write before you jump into ridicule mode.
Oh, and by the way, the Ptolemaics looked at this and they instead saw a pattern of cycles and epicycles. That supports the claim that the pattern is in the eye of the beholder.
I’ll correct myself there.
You should never jump into ridicule mode. It is against the site rules.
That it is essentially what Kukla is saying about the intentional stance and what it tells us about beliefs etc which are the patterns picked out by the intentional stance. Except she would refer to the coping actions and strategies of the beholder, not the eye of the beholder.
Now some patterns work better than others, where better is pragmatically defined to mean better at coping with the world. As long as the coping is “good enough”, Kukla would say that is sufficient to call the patterns real. And that is all “real” means: she adopts that deflationary approach to realness.
But if good enough is defined by the more stringent and objective testing of the scientific community, does that mean there is something real underlying the patterns and they are more than what it is in the eye of the consensus view of science?
To paraphrase the Beatles: “You say no, I say yes…” .
(I thought this was worth posting, even though it really does not advance the debate, since it ties into the intentional stance stuff which was tied into the OP, somehow, I think, …. well it is a bit of a blur now, but I can cope with that.)
Thanks KN. I’ll definitely get that one.
Fair enough. I used “eye of the beholder” because it is a familar phrase.
I agree that we pattern our behavior, and that we find some of those patterns more useful than others. That’s pragmatism.
I don’t have a problem with the scientists. It is the philosophical accounts of science that I am criticizing.
Data is theory laden. If we find patterns in the data, then we should ask to what extent those patterns come from the theory.
My own view: some patterns come very strongly from the theory-ladenness of the data. Other patterns just show up unexpectedly. But I’m not convinced that even those should be called “real patterns”, because there may be different ways of collecting data where they would not show up.
I keep wondering about that world “real” as used in philosophy. It seems to take “real” to have a meaning that is different from our ordinary usage of the word. And where would that hidden meaning of “real” come from? That’s where it seems to me that there is an underlying theism, in the form of adopting a “God’s eye view” philosophy.
I agree that patterns are theory laden. And I agree these are all philosophy issues, not science issues. It is philosophy of science that is analyzing the success of theories and what that might tell us about their terms and structures.
I think we just disagree on which philosophers are right about that analysis — the scientific realists or the those that reject scientific realism. Reasonable, informed people (which I think includes most philosophers!) disagree.
I am not sure why you think philosophy assumes science gives us a view from nowhere. I don’t seen that anywhere in what I read. It’s more about how our viewpoint is honed by science to align with aspects of reality, which the scientific realists say gives us the right to think the theories are picking out some real structure or entity.
And yes, the definition of reality in philosophy is definitely not what someone on the street might mean by “Get Real”. I probably should not use that “the” in “the definition” either.
ETA: I think it is patterns in a consensus theory (in a given domain of science) that have claims to reflect an aspect of reality. That word “consensus” is important. Certainly different patterns will be picked out by competing theories when there is no consensus on some phenomena in that domain of science. In that case, scientific realism says to make no commitment.
Neil:
Neil, two minutes earlier:
keiths:
Neil:
That’s incorrect. I wrote:
And:
Neil:
Some patterns are definitely in the eye of the beholder. Think of pareidolia.
Others are determined by nature, as in the case of heliocentrism. The Ptolemaics lacked information about the distances involved and they were unaware of the actual phases of Venus. It was the telescope that allowed Galileo to make his decisive observations, and the case was buttressed by later distance measurements.
Ptolemy simply lacked the evidence that would have shown him that heliocentrism was correct:
Your statement is incorrect:
Are you asking how the squirrel conceptualizes or classifies the acorn, or more about how the squirrel experiences or perceives the acorn?
No, it’s entirely metaphorical, and not a helpful metaphor, either.
Not quite; evolution is the result of those teleological processes that contribute to the likelihood that there will continue to be _____ [for any species]. But you’re right that I wasn’t specific enough.
On my picture, the locus of real teleology is each and every individual organism. That is, each and every individual organism — from E. coli on up — is a self-moving, self-directed (“autokinetic”) entity that is continually adjusting its equilibrium with its environment (an equilibrium that involves not just homeostasis but also allostasis, creating new equilibria) in order to continue its own existence or the existence of entities like itself. Organisms stave off entropy by reproducing, and in the course of doing that, populations of organisms evolve. But the process of evolution itself is not teleological.
First, I’m not sure that’s the right way to think about artifacts. It’s very intellectualistic and doesn’t seem to capture the embodied, collaborative, trial-and-error process of discovery-invention-discovery. The hammer as we know it today is the result of millions of years of technological experimentation and tinkering, sometimes informed by the application of theory, and sometimes not.
Second, even if it were, it would tell us nothing about organisms unless one had first established the analogy between organisms and artifacts. Third, we have good reasons for thinking that the analogy fails, because we know that artifacts have extrinsic finality imposed on them, whereas of organisms we know only that they have intrinsic finality. (This is why Kant describes organisms as having “purposiveness without purpose”.)
Now, we could posit some entity that stands in relation to organisms as we stand in relation to artifacts — that’s what the Argument from Design does! — but now we’re back in the same old quandary: what reasons are there for making the posit, and how could the posit ever be confirmed?
In your 1.–are you saying that the relative motions of the sun and planets are a function of (“governed by”) gravity AND NOTHING ELSE? I think you might need that to get your argument to work. (Also, I think you’ve got too many terms here. E.g., something is “human-independent” if determined by physics only if physics is human-independent. And physics can be inferred to be human-independent from the prior premises only if physics is a matter only of gravity, and human-dependence is a matter only of choices of coordinate systems.)
Playing catch-up, it’s hard to see what it is that Keiths is arguing with Neil about. Is it a map/territory thing? No mathematical model is an adequate explanation for the movements of massive bodies in space but the Newtonian model is accurate enough to still be in use, for example, in calculating space-shot trajectories.
Predictive modelling also gets harder when you try it for more than two massive objects.
Allan Miller,
Allan, I want to distinguish quite sharply between teleological processes and intentional processes.
Lizzie and a few others here seem to like “teleonomic”. I don’t see the point of distinguishing between teleonomy and teleology. It strikes me that “teleonomy” was coined to mean “it looks purposive to us, but we know it can’t really be, because that would conflict with our commitment to Epicurean metaphysics as a paradigm of scientific explanation”.
I don’t have that commitment to Epicurean metaphysics, and I’m not afraid of teleology. As long as teleology is conceptualized in a way that (a) avoids violating any laws of fundamental physics (e.g. no backwards causation) and (b) puts the concept to work in constructing testable explanations of biological phenomena, I don’t see why there should be any objection to it
But, I do think that we should understand intentionality as a special case of teleology. That’s the order of explanation: from teleology to intentionality (not the other way around!) One might say that explaining teleology in terms of intentionality is the Demiurge, the divine being (not necessarily God) who creates order in the perceptible world by imposing intelligible forms on quasi-perceptible matter. (The Designer is a Demiurge, which is one of the deep theological reasons why Thomists are reluctant to get into bed with the ID movement.)
The line of reasoning I’m sketching here and in my work is the inverse of the Demiurge: I want to explain intentionality in terms of teleology, not the other way around. The key step in this move is to start off by explaining intentional action in terms of goal-oriented behavior under complex cognitive control, and then understand the intentionality of thought and of talk in terms of their contribution to intentional action.
My goal here is to build up to fully naturalized, embodied, and socio-linguistic account of intentional thought from the purposiveness of life as such. (Explaining the purposiveness of life as such in terms of, say, complex systems theory is also interesting to me — I want to close off any gaps in which a Demiurge can hide! — but I’m less familiar with chemistry and physics than with biology and psychology.)
Alan,
Here’s a summary.
That all seem about right to me.
Been there, done that.
But I think you cannot do that without getting into arguments with keiths, and without many philosophers seeing you as obviously wrong.
walto,
No, the angular momenta of the bodies factor in as well, and over the long run, tidal forces, magnetic fields and even light pressure will have an effect. (And what about momentum changes due to radioactive emissions? 🙂 ). But those are all human-independent physical factors, just like gravity, so there’s no point in listing them exhaustively.
I’m focusing on gravity because it, not the other forces, is the determining factor for heliocentrism. It acts on mass, and the huge asymmetry in mass between the sun and the planets means that the planets orbit the sun rather than the opposite.
Physics is human-independent. There is overwhelming evidence that physics operated the same way before our arrival as it does now.
#6 doesn’t follow from #1 – #5, which is why I omitted the word “Therefore”.
#1 – #5 address Neil’s contention that the choice of coordinate system makes heliocentrism human-dependent, which is incorrect.
#6 just couples that to the fact that physics is human-independent:
Mostly, it’s about the failure of keiths to understand what I am arguing. I don’t think he is even trying to understand.
Right. And, just to underscore her point, there is no other sense of “real” besides “what matters for successful coping”. This a nice insight of pragmatic realism that Kukla develops: apart from what matters for successful coping, the concept “real” has no meaning for us. Importantly, she develops this argument by taking some time to notice that when we ask “sure, but is it literally real?”, we’re using the concept of “literally” which at some in the interpretative stance. And taking a concept from the interpretative stance and applying to all stances as such (“but which stance is literally correct?”) is — well, not a “category mistake” in the strictly Rylean sense, but a close descendent of a category mistake, what Wittgenstein would call ‘language gone on holiday’.
The major difference between my version of pragmatic realism and Kukla’s is that I want to give her a view a half-notch twist towards a bit more metaphysics than she likes. As I see it, there must be relatively stable regularities and irregularities amongst the real patterns for the different embodied stances to have anything to “latch onto”. The relative stability can’t itself be a projection from the stance; the regularities and irregularities can’t be mere event-sequences on which the mind imposes its own principles of association.
I would say so! I mean, I would think that the more rigorous and precise criteria employed by scientific communities do give us a better grasp of the underlying real patterns than, say, ritual and magic do.
But I’d also stress a converse point: that if our basic embodied coping strategies were not already in some ways engaged with real patterns, then nothing scientific practices could add would make them so.
Binoculars are no use to a blind person.
Well, I don’t know why it was coined, but Monod uses it to denote something like “functions that serve self-perpetuation”. And as things that self-perpetuate well will tend to have functions that efficiently serve self-perpetuation, the Darwinian process of adaptation is teleonomic, but not purposive.
I did get the impression there was a sort of failure to communicate.
FWIW, roughly speaking the need for coordinate independence (general covariance), was baked into GR as a precondition for its equations from the start by Einstein.
With the help of a friend who was a better mathematician than him, Einstein used work done by mathematicians like Gauss and Riemann long before he was born to create that coordinate independence.
So that would seem to resolve that particular issue.
No, wait, I guess there is this: do the entities in that mathematics exist independently of human concepts?
Then you have me at a considerable advantage, sir!
Obviously wrong about the order of explanation? Well, yes. That is true. And I see them as wrong (though not obviously so). But that’s the nature of philosophy: the conversations continue, we respond to our critics, our critics respond to us, and every generation or so some genius emerges who advances the dialectic a half-step. (I’m not that person. I’m watching from the sidelines.)
Neil,
I understand what you’ve written, but I disagree with it. I’ve explained why and I await your counterargument(s).
Is this question actually some subtle Anglo-French humor that I am missing?
BruceS,
Might be!
Yes, that’s a nice way of putting the point I’m trying to make.
My recollection of Monod is that he coins it because he finds purposiveness to be incompatible with what he calls “the postulate of objectivity,” but on my reading that’s just his own commitment to Epicureanism.
To be blunt: if it’s self-serving bullshit when a fire-and-brimstone preacher demands the right to be a judgmental prick because his conception of God requires him to, I don’t see how it’s any less self-serving bullshit when a fervently anti-religious materialist demands the right to exclude all teleological vocabulary from scientific explanations because his conception of objectivity requires him to.
As long as no laws of fundamental physics are violated (and it’s hard to know, since we don’t even have a complete understanding of fundamental physics!), we should treat teleology as being just as real as mechanism (or anything else). And we can do that thinking of purposiveness (“purposiveness without purpose”) in terms of the circular causality whereby living things are continually re-adjusting their transactions with their environments by maintaining a balance between organizational closure and thermodynamic openness.
That balance constitutes the organism-environment distinction (which in turn has been at the center of pragmatist reflections on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and social theory ever since Dewey).
That seems quite wrong to me.
If anything, it is the irregularities that we latch onto.
We could not exist in a homogeneous world. We need a lumpy world. And we navigate via the lumps.
Well, that was not my reading of Monod.
But if teleology can be defined as being without intention, I am happy to use intentional teleology as a special case of teleology.
And arguably, when the lumps are gone there will be no more anything.
That much I completely agree with, though I might want to take this in a slightly more “metaphysical” direction than you do. As I see it, sentient animals are capable of taking regularities and irregularities as affordances. But I also think that the whole coupling of affordances and abilities in the organism-environment relationship could not itself have evolved if there weren’t real regularities and irregularities at work in the dynamical structures that comprise reality at the most basic, metaphysical level of which we can (presently) comprehend.
What we stance-taking animals do is take different stances on those regularities and irregularities, or (what amounts to the same thing) engage with those relatively stable regularities and irregularities through various embodied coping strategies, many of which have a cooperative or social element and are not merely individual.
So while the sensory and motor capacities of the sentient animal severely constrain which relatively stable regularities and irregularities can show up as affordances for the animal — and thus as having significance or meaning for the animal, both cognitive and affective — those capacities do not constitute the relatively stable regularities and irregularities. Rather, the relatively stable regularities and irregularities are what there is to reality; it is the descriptions of those relatively stable regularities and irregularities which are stance-dependent, not the regularities and irregularities themselves.
Fair enough. I might be a bit too grumpy today.
At least we’ve reached the “to-may-toes, to-mah-toes” stage of dis/agreement!
I dare say that unless physics became complete while I wasn’t watching, it is an imperfect human construction, useful, but not independent of human perception.
Physics has a lot to say about regular relationships among perceptions, but not much to say about whether there is any there there.
Bowing to what I think is keiths’ point. any model of the solar system that does not have the phases of Venus as an entailment is less adequate than a heliocentric model.
But the heliocentric model is still metaphorical.
petrushka,
The word ‘physics’ has more than one meaning. You are using it in sense #1 below, while I am using it in sense #2.
Physics in sense #1 is human-dependent, but physics in sense #2 is not.
I had a good laugh at that. The wording was excellent.
And I agree.
I sometime see people engaging in a lot of doubletalk to pretend that we can do science without teleology. But science itself is a teleologically driven enterprise.
I could say similar things about intentionality. Several years ago, someone (I’ll call him “David” since he used that name) was posting on usenet, and objecting to intention, intension, etc. He said that we should only use FOPC (first order predicate calculus) so that we could avoid these alleged crimes. I dared him to use FOPC in his next usenet post. And I reminded David of that on several occasions. But, of course, he never did. Natural language is intentional and intensional because we need that to communicate. It is very difficult to communicate in FOPC.
I intend making this the last of my posts specifically on the disagreement with keiths.
Firstly, I agree that heliocentric patterns are real in the sense that ordinary people would say that they are real — and meaning is use.
Secondly, if keiths believes that heliocentrism is true rather than conventional, then he owes us the theory of truth that he is using, and he owes us an argument as to why it is true by that theory of truth.
Thirdly, I agree that if you start with heliocentrism, then you will find heliocentrism. I think that’s called “begging the question”, and it is pretty much the basis of the arguments that keiths is using.
His latest argument depends on gravity. But heliocentrism was around before there was a theory of gravity. It was the heliocentric assumptions that made it possible to develop a theory of gravity. So using gravity to argue for heliocentrism is question begging. That heliocentrism led to a theory of gravity is one of the great pragmatic benefits of heliocentrism. But it says nothing about the truth of heliocentrism unless your theory of truth builds on pragmatism.
I’ll add that, personally, I see the correspondence theory of truth as thoroughly question begging.
I can’t speak for Aquinas, but I think that Aristotle actually did have that view. Though Aristotle does recognize the role of embodiment in sense-perception, and that the intelligible forms enter the soul though sense-perception, he also thinks that the intellect has the ability to sift through whatever comes in through the senses and “recover” the pure form in itself. And I don’t think that, for Aristotle, our embodiment plays any essential role in our intellect (the intellectual part of the soul, or nous).
Other philosophers who have thought that knowledge is a confrontation of the pure disembodied intellect with the pure world-in-itself: Descartes, certainly. Spinoza, probably. Leibniz, I would say so as well.
Not Spinoza, I don’t think.
There may really be something out there, but I don’t think we can know it. What we do is create models. The models are maps, not the territory.
I have conceded that models differ in quality. Epicycles were great for computation, at least until better versions of heliocentrism came along. But epicycles have trouble with the phases of Venus.
So heliocentrism has fewer problems than geocentrism, but it is a map, not the territory.
Since Neil may be dropping out of the discussion, I have some questions for the general readership:
1a. Do any of you think that flat-earthism is not a crackpot idea, maintained only at the cost of ignoring the vast scientific evidence for a round earth?
1b. Do any of you think that YEC is not a crackpot idea, maintained only at the cost of ignoring the vast scientific evidence for an old earth?
1c. Do any of you think that geocentrism is not a crackpot idea, maintained only at the cost of ignoring the vast scientific evidence for heliocentrism?
2a. Do any of you think that you can get from flat-earthism to round-earthism simply by changing the coordinate system you use?
2b. Ditto for YEC.
2c. Ditto for geocentrism.
3. Are any of you in agreement with, and willing to defend, Neil’s three statements below?
#1:
#2:
#3:
It depends on how one conceives of the relata of the correspondence relation. If the relata are propositions (or, prior to the linguistic turn, “thoughts” or “ideas”) on the one hand, and objects and their relations on the other hand, then yes, I agree.
However, if the relata are embodied discursive practices and relatively stable regularities and irregularities, then the whole problem of “realism” can be put through a pragmatist turn. And then the criterion of adequate correspondence — bearing in mind that “adequacy” comes in degrees! — is just successful coping.
A further and important wrinkle is that, according to our best neuroscience, an organism is able to cope successfully with its environments insofar as the structure and dynamics of its primary sensory cortical regions have homomorphic relations with motivationally salient affordances and processes in its environment that preserve the topographical and topological features of those affordances and processes. I see no reason to deny that these neural maps are representations (though I recognize that there’s a huge debate here amongst cognitive scientists and philosophers of cognitive science).
Hence my version of pragmatism is not the Rortyian anti-realist “not correspondence but coping” but the pragmatic realist “correspondence is coping”.
Since you have ignored my comments, I’ll not respond to yours.
Based on the forgoing, I’m wondering if you’d mind the following restatement of your argument, which DOES allow for a “therefore” at the end:
1. The relative motions of the sun and the planets are governed solely by gravity and such other physical forces, entities and properties as angular momenta, tidal forces, magnetic fields, light pressure, etc. which may be called ‘matters of physics proper.’ (NB: Although EVERYTHING may in some sense be “a matter of physics”, we here call only the basic entities and law of physics “matters of physics proper.”) [Def.]
2. None of the matters of physics proper (the physical forces, entities or properties discovered by physicists) are “human-dependent.” For example, gravity is a function only of the masses of the bodies and the distances between them. (That they are discovered, studied, etc. does not make them dependent on humans.) [Premise]
3. Choice of a coordinate system like geo- or helio-centrism is not a matter of physics proper. It is, on the contrary, entirely human-dependent. [Premise]
4. Therefore the matters of physics proper, such as gravitational forces, are entirely independent of the coordinate system. [From 2 and 3]
5. The relative motion of the bodies in our solar system is a matter of physics proper. [Premise]
6. Therefore the relative motion of the bodies in our solar system is entirely independent of the choice of any particular coordinate system. [From 3 and 5]
Not sure I’ve captured it perfectly, but you can let me know. And if it DOES get at what you’re saying here, it may help those who disagree to focus on the particular premise or premises they object to.
I’m certainly not trying to say that physical theories are not models we construct in order to explain our observations.
However, it seems to me that some people here take this fact to mean that we cannot compare our models with reality (our “maps” with the “territory”). And I’m not quite sure that it is correct. Rather, I think we can compare our models with reality indirectly by comparing the models with each other. Specifically, when comparing theories A and B, we build a counterpart model in theory B of the model constructed in theory A. Then we explain, in theory B, why the counter-part model is a rough approximation of the better model.
For example: general relativity and classical mechanics are incommensurable, because they make quite different presuppositions about space, time, and mass. But we can still explain, using general relativity, both why classical mechanics was in fact so successful and also why classical mechanics was unable to solve the problems that it was unable to solve (e.g the perihelion of Mercury).
The committed scientific instrumentalist can say that this is a merely pragmatic difference — that general relativity is more useful for solving certain problems. We then come to a conflict of philosophical intuitions or temperaments: to what extent does one feel there to be a real question as to why one theory is more useful or successful than another? A scientific realist is someone who wants to answer this question, and an instrumentalist is someone who is more or less content to shrug her shoulders at it.
walto,
Would it follow, then, that the relative motions of the planetary bodies can be appealed to in helping us understand why heliocentrism generates better predictions than geocentrism?
I note that my restatement, like the original, doesn’t conclude with the solar system REALLY being helio-centric. I take it there’s a further argument to get that. And my sense is that it derives from this:
But that’s a little softer than “Heliocentrism is true, and geocentrism is false.” I’ll leave it to keiths or others to indicate how they’d fill in the blanks or indicate why they think these can’t easily be filled in.