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.
Don’t ask me, I’m just acting as (unofficial) scribe here!
Welcome aboard.
My edit function has gone bye-bye.
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Hmm. It’s available on THIS post…..
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I’m wondering if once a comment moves to an “older comment” page, the edit function disappears, regardless of how recently the comment was posted.
I think I see the problem: that’s clearly false. The intelligibility of reality does not depend on accepting essentialist and teleological metaphysics.
Feser’s arguments for this conclusion rely on a priori considerations — Aristotle’s response to Parmenides, if I understand his dialectics aright. The pragmatist alternative from Peirce through Dewey is simply not on his radar. Once the pragmatist alternative is clearly presented, the whole rest of the argument collapses.
Non homogenous beings could not exist in a homogenous world. I’m on board with everyone else on that one!
How about pasteurized beings?
KN, I think we can place models in an order of quality based on their entailments and the degree to which they predict observations. But there are times in the history of science in which the accuracy of predictions favors an otherwise obsolete model. The original Copernican model had circular orbits and epicycles, making it no more coherent than geocentrism.. Except for the phases of Venus.
Much of what is taught in chemistry prior to a course in physical chemistry has to be unlearned. The models are good for some purposes but not others. It is useful to know that models have limitations and are not reality.
We have the same problem in biology, where the Darwinian adaptationist model is a good teaching tool at some levels, but is not reality.
I thought the earth was flat until I saw the Rocky Mountains. I no longer believe the earth is flat, and “the vast scientific evidence” had nothing to do with it.
Oh, and those same mountains likewise convinced me the earth is not round. Well, them and the Grand Canyon.
petrushka,
Is this directed at me?
petrushka,
In terms of comparing Copernican system with the Ptolemaic system, that’s quite right (so far as I know). It wasn’t until the much later work of Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, and finally Newton that we had a model that was significantly better than the Ptolemaic model. Even then, Newton didn’t know how the whole system could have possibly been started. It took Pierre Laplace (and, independently, Immanuel Kant) to show that gravitational attraction could have resulted in the formation of planets and the sun from a cloud of interstellar gas. And neither Kant nor Laplace could have understood stellar nucleosynthesis!
It is true that scientific education requires a lot of scaffolding — you acquire familiarity with a model for one level of understanding, then have to let go of it or overcome it in order to arrive at a deeper or more adequate understanding at the next level (and iteratively, over the course of one’s career for a practicing scientist). But I don’t think it follows, from that all-important fact about how we learn to think scientifically, that our scientific models are not also increasingly better approximations of reality.
Though I should also say that, for reasons I’m not yet completely clear on, I think that convergent realism only works for fundamental physics. (Trying to understand precisely why this is so is one of my side-interests for this summer’s research — my main research is still going to be on enactivism, intentionality, and rationality.)
I see those as contradictory.
I see no necessity that “force” be one of our named concepts in the coordinate system. So if coordinate systems are human-dependent (and I agree that they are), then having a physics that mentions force must also be human dependent.
You can perhaps say that there’s a coordinate-free world that is human independent. But we cannot say anything about it without coordinates.
walto,
The issue isn’t whether the solar system is REALLY heliocentric, or whether the earth is REALLY round or REALLY old. Those are interesting philosophical questions, but they aren’t germane to my dispute with Neil.
I am talking about truth in its everyday sense. If your car is in the parking lot, and I ask you “Where’s your car?”, you’ll typically answer “in the parking lot.” You won’t say “Under certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, my car is in the parking lot” or “I believe my car is in the parking lot, but perhaps I am being fooled by a Cartesian evil demon”. If I ask “Your car is in the parking lot. True?”, you’ll answer “True”, unless you are insufferably pedantic.
I am using “truth” in that everyday sense. It’s true that the earth is round. It’s false that the earth is flat. It’s true that the earth is old. It’s false that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. It’s true that the solar system is heliocentric. It’s false that the solar system is geocentric. It’s true that Barack Obama is president. It’s false that Donald Trump is president, thanks to FSM for that.
Flat-earthism, YEC, and geocentrism are crackpot ideas.They are false in the everyday sense, and we rightly laugh when people cling to them against overwhelming evidence.
Change the coordinate system all you like, but flat-earthism is still a crackpot idea, utterly at odds with the evidence. Ditto for YEC and geocentrism.
I think scientific models are increasingly useful, but I would deny they are reality. I would agree that newer models are more parsimonious, and that has historically been an indicator of longevity, but models are constructed to facilitate our alligator brain way of interacting with the word.
In my experience, that seems to be what proponents of the correspondence theory usually mean.
(Context for readers: the “I agree” there is with my assertion that the correspondence theory begs the question it is supposed to answer).
Okay, this at least begins to make more sense. But I think it is too vague as presented there.
Obsolete ideas are not crackpot. They are obsolete. People can be crackpot by defending obsolete ideas.
I don’t see anyone arguing against this. But I would argue that current models are more useful rather than closer to reality.
I might argue that thinking a model reflects reality is a pretty good way to get stuck in a local optimum.
petrushka,
Geocentrism wasn’t crackpot in Ptolemy’s day, but it is now.
Keiths, when I wrote ‘really’ in ‘really true,’ I meant to convey something like ‘exclusively.’ I take it that Neil’s position is something like–‘just as we can put all the relevant facts in such a way that all our statements are true using a heliocentric system, we can also do that using geocentric coordinates. (Correct that if it’s wrong, Neil.)
When you’ve said heliocentrism is true, I’ve understood you to be including (under your breath as it were) ”…and geocentrism isn’t.”
Hence the ‘really.’
walto,
I think the biggest source of Neil’s confusion is that he isn’t distinguishing between the heliocentric model and the heliocentric coordinate system, nor between the geocentric model and the geocentric coordinate system.
The choice of coordinate system is orthogonal to the choice of model. You can represent a heliocentric model in either geocentric or heliocentric coordinates. The same is true of a geocentric model. The geocentric model is false in either coordinate system because it fails to correctly predict the phases of Venus (and many other things).
Geocentrism is a crackpot idea, but we use geocentric coordinates all the time. If you’re trying to put a satellite into orbit around the earth, for example, the last thing you’d want to use would be heliocentric coordinates! So you use geocentric coordinates while rejecting geocentrism and embracing heliocentrism. This isn’t a contradiction — not even in the slightest.
The hammer of today may be more effective than a rock, but in some sense it’s still just a rock, and if you don’t have a “hammer” to hand, hammer it with a rock .
I think you were missing my point, which means I wasn’t making it very well. It has nothing to do with analogy and everything with being capable of performing a function.
Not just any conglomeration of parts could function like this.
The fact that it’s a hammer is not due to it’s shape nor is it due to it’s necessarily being an artifact. Is the heart a pump only by analogy? Is the lens of an eye a lens only by analogy? I don’t know where you stand on that, but I would wager that there are people here who would argue precisely that.
So many false models. So few true models. Think I’ll just sniff the glue.
That’s an important distinction. And it illustrates, I think, why it’s so important for people to be very clear about what they’re asserting. It’s possible that you and Neil don’t disagree after all.
walto,
Yes, and especially so for a mathematician. It makes Neil’s error all the more surprising.
No, he and I definitely disagree. I’ve drawn that coordinate system/model distinction at least four or five times in this thread alone. Neil has dismissed it as “nonsense” and “ridiculous bullshit”. He has a white-knuckle grip on his irrational belief. Good luck to anyone trying to pry it out of his fingers.
Neil,
But ordinary people think that the heliocentric pattern was there before there were humans, that it was there when people thought the solar system was geocentric, and that it’s there now. Ordinary people see the patterns of heliocentrism or of romanesco broccoli as real patterns in nature that are there regardless of whether humans happen to be perceiving them.
You vehemently disagree with “ordinary people” on this issue.
For the purposes of this discussion, my “theory of truth” is the everyday one.
Not at all. People started as geocentrists but became heliocentrists because of what nature told them.
The phases of Venus are a real pattern in nature, and they are human-independent. If they were human-imposed, then you’d expect the geocentrists to see a different phase pattern from the heliocentrists. They don’t. Everyone sees the same pattern, and it’s the one predicted by heliocentrism and not the one predicted by geocentrism.
That is why scientifically literate people are heliocentrists, and it’s why geocentrists are regarded as crackpots.
First, you are making the same mistake with respect to gravity that petrushka made with respect to physics. The theory of gravity is distinct from the phenomenon of gravity. It is the phenomenon of gravity that is responsible for the solar system’s heliocentrism.
Ironically, you and petrushka have fallen into a map/territory error.
Second, the argument for heliocentrism doesn’t depend on the theory of gravity. The phases of Venus are sufficient to demonstrate the fact of heliocentrism. The theory of gravity explains why the solar system is heliocentric.
I know Neil doesn’t want to engage on this issue any further. I’m wondering, though, if I could prevail on him to just say a couple of words about this:
It now strikes me that that might be the crux of this issue, and I’m wondering if it seems a coherent position to Neil (and maybe also petrushka, who has also opined on at least closely related matters). I personally find this kind of stuff very confusing.
Then, if it does seem coherent, there is this further remark of keiths’:
Thoughts on that?
The phases of Venus are rather troublesome for a geocentric model, and I would not try to defend a geocentric model. I simply don’t think models are reality. The diagrams of orbits shown in books don’t even model Newtonian orbits when you consider the motions of all the bodies involved.
Can one coherently distinguish “the model” from “the coordinate system” in your view?
petrushka,
I don’t either, and I don’t think anyone in this thread has claimed that they are.
First, a model is a model of something. It isn’t that thing itself.
Second, models can be more or less accurate. If models simply were reality, it would be impossible for them to be inaccurate!
The real issue here is that the geocentric model is falsified by the phases of Venus and many other observations. It is a crackpot idea, and you cannot rescue it by changing coordinate systems.
My understanding of the basic thrust of Neil’s position is this:
A model can be very successful at predicting reality. A model can have many other positive scientific virtues, eg simplicity, math elegance, concordance with other scientific models, making novel predictions, long time acceptance by the scientific community.
Despite all of this, a model must always be based on human concepts. And anything based on human concepts cannot tell us about reality full stop. It can only tell us about reality as viewed by human concepts.
For example, it is true that any coordinate system makes the same predictions in GR, but you sill need to choose one. There is no human-accessible view from nowhere; such a view would be the only way to draw conclusions about reality full stop.
The phases of Venus means that heliocentric is a better model by a very basic scientific criterion, i.e. preserving observations made by the human eye. But phases and planets are still human concepts.
(And also, there is the Tychonic_system which I understand does account for phases of Venus. But that fact is irrelevant in my understanding of Neil’s position.)
It isn’t the crux of the issue, but I agree that it is a coherent position.
What is quite clear, is that keiths has completely misunderstood what I was arguing. He seems to strongly believe that he understands, though he clearly doesn’t. And he seems to have made it his mission in life to ridicule me for the beliefs that he falsely ascribes to me.
Remember: The nap is not the territory. Except around 4:00 in the afternoon.
I don’t deny that biological phenomena have functions, and indeed, proper functions. The function of the heart is to pump blood, the function of the lens is to focus light on the retina, etc. My point is that biological functions and artifactual functions are distinct, because biological functions are determined on the basis of the intrinsic or immanent finality of the organism as a whole, and artifactual functions are determined on the basis of the purpose that the artifact serves for those who made it.
In other words, organisms have “purposiveness without purpose,” but artifacts do indeed have purposes. That makes biological and artifactual functions quite different, and it is precisely this difference that is neglected by the analogy between organisms and artifacts that lies at the heart of the Argument from Design. This is also why the Argument from Design, and contemporary design theory, is and always has been deeply mistaken to assume that we are entitled to posit the existence of a designer or Demiurge from the fact of teleological realism.
Sure, except that the course of experience always shows us that the model isn’t reality. As William James nicely puts it, experience is always “bubbling over” all of the categories we put around it, so the need to revise, expand, and even create new categories is never-ending.
Yes, we’re likely to be more receptive to what experience shows us if we adopt an attitude of tentativeness towards our models, but that’s also consistent with thinking that what we do experience, when our experience does give us reasons for revising our models, is a slightly bigger glimpse of reality than what we were able to describe before.
I won’t repeat the details. But yes, that’s about right.
And, for most of what we do most of the time, it doesn’t matter. But for those of us studying human cognition, this is related to what cognitive systems need to do.
Precisely. And that is the distinction that Monod (as I read him) makes between “teleonomy” (serving the perpetuation aka “immanent finality”?) of the whole, and serving some external purpose of the fabricator.
But as long as we are clear about the distinction, I am happy to accept whatever terminology makes it clear!
Bruce, I think I’m asking a more basic/elementary/ignorant question than the one you answer above (for which, many thanks).
We pick a coordinate system–say one with coordinates 0,0,0 at the center of the earth. It’s pretty clear to me that that isn’t correct or not correct. As Neil says, it’s conventional. And as you say, we simply pick one that we find useful, simple, etc.
But now take these planetary MODELS we’re speaking of. keiths says something like this: “The heliocentric model is akin to saying ‘Look, the planets revolve around the sun (and they don’t revolve around the earth).'” That makes the model seem more like something that can be true or false, something that doesn’t just reflect a preference (for instrumental reasons) of one coordinate system over another.
But CAN a model which is basically a claim about what is moving relative to what in space be independent of a coordinate system choice in that way? I mean, some models (take an atomic idea of neutrons, protons and electrons) obviously don’t require a choice of one spatial coordinate system over another. But in this case, are the model and the map really independent?
Neil’s remark above that the choice of, e.g., a heliocentric coordinate system along with a geocentric model is coherent. I don’t doubt him. As I said, though, I find this stuff very confusing and would appreciate a bit more–though I have no high expectations about being able to follow what I’m told.
Likewise.
Yes, that’s about right.
In easy cases we think of coordinate systems as static. But if we consider a heliocentric coordinate system and a geocentric coordinate system, then those are moving with respect to one another. This may make it harder to think about, but it isn’t a big problem. Both mathematicians and physicists are used to the idea of “curvilinear coordinates”.
I understand you to be asking whether models can be distinct from coordinate systems. Sure, though it can be unwieldy.
However, my point was about coordinate systems. That keiths chose to take that as about models is probably where the miscommunication begins.
So let me elaborate on why I brought up the issue of patterns (in response to BruceS).
There’s a very commonly held view that the brain is very good at finding patterns, and that we gain knowledge that way. If you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have agreed with that view. But I now see that it is a mistake, perhaps a fundamental mistake of empiricism. Instead, I see the brain as concerned with constructing something like coordinate systems, as a necessary prerequisite of having useful information. Traditionally a scientific theory is often said to give discovered patterns. But, as I see it, the most important thing that a scientific theory does is establish something like a coordinate system and establish rules for presenting real world data in that coordinate system. So data is necessarily theory laden, because a major purpose of the theory is to define the data to be used.
For the benefit of KN, let me connect this up with intentionality.
A photon strikes a retinal sensory cell. That’s data of some sort, and many people seem to think that’s where it all starts. But it really isn’t data about anything other than the condition of that retinal cell. We don’t know where the photon came from, so we cannot connect it with anything in the real world. That data lacks intentionality (or aboutness). So that kind of data is the wrong starting point.
You wake up in a strange place. For a moment, you are lost. Then you notice a familiar landmark, and you begin to get your bearings. The landmark helps you tie what you are seeing into the real world.
An example from science. The celsius temperature scale uses the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water as major calibration points. Those are like familiar landmarks. They are irregularities that we can use to anchor the temperature scale to reality. Once we have those anchor points, we can use methods from geometry to divide the scale into 100 equal temperature points between those anchors. There a lot of regularity in that way of dividing up the temperature scale, and it is all human created regularity (created by the way that we divided up the scale). But the irregularities that anchor the scale to reality are what makes our temperature readings about something real.
I see a scientific theory as, most importantly, defining data in a way that it can be tied back to what it is about in reality. So the most important job of a theory is in solving an intentionality problem, rather than a pattern discovery problem. And I’ll note that I believe the perceptual system has to be doing something similar to that.
Neil Rickert,
I completely agree that brains are actively looking for solutions that satisfy their coordination problems, rather than passively taking up whatever data is lying around in the environment — and that this understanding of cognition undermines empiricism. (It also undermines rationalism, for different reasons.)
That said, I’m interested in exploring the idea that a collaboration of such brains, differently embodied but able to share their respective perspectives, could nevertheless exploit their grasp of relevant affordances in order to disclose the relatively stable regularities that constitute the ground of those affordances.
It’s often been claimed that if we accept what cognitive neuroscience tells us about what brains are for, that undermines any pretensions to metaphysical realism, including scientific realism. (Philosophers who make these kind of claim often point to Dewey as the first philosopher to anticipate this line of thought.)
I am less confident than my fellow pragmatists that this line of inference is sound. It seems to me, rather, that a neuroscientifically-informed self-conception will require us to revise what realism is, not abandon it. In fact, I suspect that the move to abandon realism in light of neuroscience is itself prompted by a temptation to interpret neuroscience itself in Kantian terms, where it is our neurophysiological processes, rather than a priori forms of sensible intuition and categories of pure understanding, that play the role of “constructing” our sense of reality.
But if we subject the Kantian epistemological picture to a critique of its own (as we see in, for example, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), then we need not interpret neuroscience in Kantian terms, and then neuroscience is no threat to realism as such. (It is a threat to certain versions of realism, yes, but we shouldn’t let the specific version of an idea turn us off from the very idea.)
Yes, I agree.
The question of collaboration is an interesting and important one.
As I see it, my view of perception implies that we each independently come up with our ways of categorizing the world, and we very likely come up with rather different categories.
However, we evolved as a social species, so we have some sort of inner drive to cooperate with others. And, it seems to me, the effect will be that a child will be attempting to align its categories with those of the people around him/her. I would expect the resulting alignment to be imperfect, but good enough to allow cooperative behavior and communication. In my opinion, the evidence is consistent with this.
It is well known from research into feral children, that if these children are introduced to society at too late an age, they never do fully acquire language. I believe this to be because their own private set of categories and conceptual structure has become too far developed to be able to be adequately aligned with the culture into which they were introduced. This evidence of a critical age has often been said to say something about language and about Chomsky’s idea of an innate universal grammar. But I think it far more likely that it is due to categories and conceptual structures that are too divergent to be able to adequately align.
As to realism: according to what is said in some discussions of realism, I am a realist. But, according to others, I’m not. We need a version of realism that is consistent with how our brains work and how they learn to interact with the world.
I have no problem with saying the geocentric model cannot have the phases of Venus as an entailment, and it therefore defective. But all models fail at extremes. They are not reality. Models are used within their applicable bounds to make predictions. They are not reality, even if some have greater applicability than others.
Planets do not orbit the sun. Planets do not return to a point of origin on an ellipse. They fall through space time following a line shaped by the masses in the vicinity, and even this is an incomplete description of “reality.”
If you believe you have captured something real in a model, you are good to go as an engineer, but probably not prepared for the next iteration of theory.
Aha! You want a realism that is true, rather than one that doesn’t comport with reality and how we learn about it!
It’s no wonder you don’t like philosophy! 🙂
Realism doesn’t have a destination. That’s trite, but is a good working hypothesis.
Amen to that!
Hey, so at least I got something out of the interchanges we’ve had.
And I see you’ve raised that feral child which we had a set-to about around one year ago.
Nothing new under the sun, it seems.
Well, maybe there is, as I what I seem to be reading is walto acting as an referee/translator acting on KeithS’s behalf (and yours). So that is something new, I guess.
BruceS,
Walto has had his own disagreements with keiths, which probably makes him more interested in this disagreement.
Believe it or not, I’m more interested in the issue than the disagreement. I wish it could be discussed without keiths getting nasty with those who disagree with him (in this case possibly you), but it’s quite hard–you really have to walk on eggshells.
Anyhow, you said above that separating the coordinate system from the model was doable, if unwieldy. (That’s something you two seem to agree upon, btw). Could you elaborate on that? Maybe explain a bit how one would go about it? (hopefully without too much math–my abilities are pretty limited in that direction). Thanks.
Another obvious philosophy hater. 🙂
Philosophy is both intellectually stimulating and fulfilling if you’re using the right coordinate system.
You would probably do any theorizing in the natural coordinate system for the model. And if you had data from a different coordinate system, you would convert it as needed.
Come to think of it, Kepler must have done that. A lot of the data that he used would have been recorded as geocentric data. And he didn’t have modern computers to help with the computation.