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.
Yup.
Is there still a process even if there is no outcome?
fG
I was a bit surprised when you said:
A drainage basin is the outcome of a series of processes. Some elements of these processes are directed (water flows downhill as directed by gravity) but what makes you think they directed ‘at some end’?
fG
I was being flippant. But, seriously, any process that is observed in real time hasn’t yet had an outcome, I guess. So, I’d say, of course.
So was I.
I agree, according to definition no. 2) from the source quoted by Mung (who, incidentally, still has not acknowledged that there is more to it than his chosen definition no. 1).
fG
Well, it comes down to definitions again. If a raindrop falls into a stream at the top top, it will “end” up in the sea. And it will be “directed” to that “end” by the topography of the landscape. But I would not usually use the word “teleological” to describe that process, despite the fact that there is an “end” and the raindrop is “directed” to it.
As I said, for the word to be a meaningful discriminator between process directed by a mind and some alternative kind of process, I’d say there has to be something/one somewhere who actually intends that this should happen, rather than some other “end” for the raindrop, e.g. landing in some puddle and evaporating off.
William J. Murray,
We were talking of the germ theory of disease and plate tectonics as your examples. Germ theory, it turned out, involved material causes – germs. Plate tectonics, it turned out, involved material causes – convection currents in the mantle, upwelling, gravitational sliding and subduction. I do not refer to these as ‘material’ due to ontological commitment, but by observation of how (it was discovered) causality was implemented. A hunch that the cause was material would have been a good one. It’s inductive reasoning, but it’s served us well so far …
You seem to be switching to a deeper level – calling for ultimate reductionism, or rather keeping Lewontin’s door propped open by pointing to ‘other’ things we don’t have ultimate causal accounts for.
Still, if you think there is a class of ‘non-material’ causes that can affect what we tend to term the ‘material’, by pushing it around, or affecting its fields in some way – I can’t say you’re categorically wrong, but nor do I think it unreasonable to expect that this would leave an imprint on matter, and feed into the material world. After all, that’s what ID argues. If it didn’t feed in, it would be undetectable by science as opposed to any appropriately tuned swami.
What ID lacks is a means to distinguish putative ‘non-material’ causes from ‘material’ ones (whatever those really mean). Or is that our job?
We seem to be in violent agreement. We can add now the word ‘end’ to the list of ambiguous terms next to ‘process’. An end can be an outcome, a goal, or both (or neither, when we reach the end of the road).
I am actually in the camp that uses teleological language for convenience, as shortcuts to describe what I believe are unintentional processes that are too involved and cumbersome to describe in purely mechanistic terms. This works fine until someone comes in who does believe in actual teleology in natural processes, and tells us we are biased for not doing the same.
Biased against teleology, or not convinced that there is any evidence for it? To me that is a difference without a distinction.
fG
William J. Murray,
Given that matter is really energy, but we don’t really know what energy is, you seem to be excluding everything from the categories ‘natural’, or ‘material’, on the basis that ‘we don’t really know how’.
Find me something non-natural, or immaterial, and I’ll have a play with it.
Mung,
So in answer to the question “which of ‘process’ and ‘teleology’ do you wish to restrict in order that processes are teleological ‘by definition’?”, you’ve plumped for ‘both’. 🙂
William J. Murray,
All ‘material’ particles possess one or more fields (debatable, in the case of gravity, but it’s closely analogous) that extend beyond the boundary of the particle itself (already fuzzy). In the case of gravity, that extension reaches right across the universe; in the strong force, it barely reaches outside the atomic nucleus. No idea why. But if two such fields interact – ‘behave’ – that is a material interaction. Surely? What would it mean to say that – underneath – there is something ‘immaterial’, or ‘non-natural’, going on?
I’ll throw in an example from computation.
A computational process with a goal is called an “algorithm”. Strictly speaking, it is required that it reach the goal in a finite number of steps, though the number of steps need not be knowable in advance.
An operating system is a computational process which has no goal, so is not algorithmic (though it uses algorithms internally). I’m inclined to say that an operating system has a purpose in the broad sense of “a function” — it does something that we value. But there is no goal. So an operating system is a non-teleological process. An algorithm is a teleological process.
The objection to “teleology” is that it is not a useful term. We can talk about algorithms, but the terminology of teleology is not particularly useful for discussing algorithms. The mathematical analysis of algorithms is mainly about the mechanism whereby the algorithm achieves its goal. Teleology is mainly interested in the goal.
There is an another concept of teleology in the paper “What Makes Biological Science Teleological (Massio and Bich 2014)” that KN recommended. It is the idea of Intrinsic Teleology.
The authors say a riverbed is a physical process with no teleology.
A designed tool has extrinsic teleology, eg from a human designer or from nature considered as the as-if designer for selection.
The authors of the paper say something is missing from extrinsic, as-if teleology applied to living organisms. Intuitively, it is “self-purpose”, the self-determination that individual biological organisms have to in order to maintain their own existence. The authors note that organisms must be able to do that to reproduce and so be subject to evolution. They claim self-determination hence has priority over the as-if teleology of evolution.
To define intrinsic teleology, the authors start by pointing out that organisms are dissipative systems: they operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium while still exchanging matter and energy with their environment.
They then say such systems have intrinsic teleology when
(very roughly)
1. they are organized as a network of mutually independent biological components, each exerting a causal connection on others, so the whole network can self-maintain
2. these cycles are subject to constraints of operation, eg boundary conditions
3. the constraints are in some sense created and maintained by the components of point 1: there is a two-way, inter-level connection of components creating the constraints under which they operate.
4. The organism is closed in the sense that the constraints and components are internal.
Such an entity is self determining and is said to have intrinsic teleology.
This idea seems to be the “real” teleology that KN prefers as opposed to the as-if teleology of selection.
To say that a behavior is goal directed implies that a relationship has been learned and a forward model of consequences made. The learner could be a person, a cat, or a computer program.
In the case of microbes, the forward model has been constructed via evolution, which is a kind of learning.
Allan Miller said:
I was talking about that when making a case that ontological narratives can impede scientific progress. I switched to “deeper levels” when the discussion turned to the idea that all known behaviors are known to be due to material causes. Materialists cannot scientifically say that fundamental forces, laws and energy transfers occur because of material causation. That is a category error. They don’t know what causes lawful, force, and energy-transfer behaviors.
It can be adequately described as material behavior because the behavior is predictable via deterministic laws, probability, etc. What causes that behavior cannot be said to be material. “Nature” and “material” are, at this level, descriptions of behaviors. They cannot be scientifically attached to what causes that behavior.
Therefore, it is an error to say that all known behaviors are known to have material causes. That’s just flat-out false.
But if we can’t scientifically investigate those causes then your distinction does not have a difference. I think you just want praise for your sophisticated philosophical musings.
I think we all do this. It’s just that we tend not to notice until some misguided IDer comes along and points it out (or pulls a Mung by highlighting every teleological word in bold).
Folks in my profession use teleological language all the time. Here are some examples (with the Mung treatment applied):
You see, processors are full of conscious, purposeful entities who are pushing, pulling, using, reserving, asserting, wanting, seeing, and telling.
Take that, materialists!
A discussion re fMRI yesterday:
“The model is trying to fit the underswing, and so it’s having to use the temporal derivative, and that’s bringing the peak forward…”
Those thunder rumblings are trying to tell us something.
You could say that all homeostatic systems are teleological.
And evolutionary processes are homeostatic.
Adaptive processes are homeostatic, but biological evolution is also serendipitous.
Another anthropomorphism?
Our language is awash in metaphors, some very deeply embedded.
If the IDers’ teleological language argument were legitimate, you could use the same logic to argue for materialism:
“That argument carries a lot of weight, but is the evidence really strong enough to support it?”
See? It’s all physical!
IDers can surely recognize the absurdity of that argument, so why do they make the same error in their own?
That’s exactly right; my suggestion is that intrinsic teleology (as defined above) is real — as real as you like! — and that extrinsic teleology is not. I’m going to read the Mossio and Bich paper again, and also the Weber and Varela paper, “Life After Kant”.
However, I also suspect — and this is a wild, off-the-cuff idea that no one has really developed — that one important reason why the evolutionary process can appear extrinsically purposive is because phylogenies are re-descriptions of the histories of populations of organisms, and individual organism is intrinsically purposive.
I hugely admire Okrent’s Rational Animals, in which he develops a Dennettian concept of a “teleological stance”: we conceptualize something as having purposive goals. (Not: as having beliefs and desires. The teleological stance is distinct from the intentional stance, conceptually and psychologically.) Okrent uses this concept to describe how we make sense of animate life. But helpful as this is, it relies on a problematic reading of what a stance sensu Dennett is. For Okrent, as for Dennett, a stance seems to be a sort of intellectual schema that is projected onto — well, onto what? For Dennett, the stance certainly cannot be projected onto “reality” (since Dennett is opposed to metaphysical realism) and certainly not onto “experience” (since Dennett is opposed to qualia, and also I suspect Dennett would accept Davidson’s criticism of the scheme/content distinction).
The closest Dennett ever comes to answering that question — what are stances taken towards? — is: real patterns. And real patterns are defined in informational terms, though as Harold Kincaid helpfully points out, real patterns can also be defined in thermodynamic terms.
However, I think that progress can be made by following a very interesting suggestion by Rebecca Kukla about how to understand Dennettian stances as ways of pragmatic coping with reality (“Embodied Stances: Realism Without Literalism“). Here’s the key move:
I want to follow through on this re-interpretation of Dennett by asking, in part, how the practical conduct of a biologist, physician, or physical therapist (etc.) is structured by the skilled coping constitutive of taking up a teleological stance. (On a related point, Kukla argues that there is neither a universal stance, nor a stance that determines which stance is correct — which means that a whole lot of traditional and analytic metaphysics should be rejected. Can’t say I have any problem with that, though I would still want to retain the bare minimal metaphysics necessary to get all other inquiry up and running.)
In fact, I think that a synthesis of Kukla on Dennettian stances with Ladyman and Ross on Dennettian patterns would show that the stance/pattern distinction allows us to retain what is correct Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction but without the problematic metaphysics of transcendental idealism in which Kant posed it. It might seem quixotic (to say the least) that the phenomena/noumena distinction can be liberated from transcendental idealism, since it is usually taken to be the very heart of transcendental idealism, but I am firmly convinced that it can and should be done. I’ll be working on that project later on this summer.
One consequence, though, to draw from this project is that the teleological stance is an embodied coping strategy for correctly classifying and describing autopoietic systems. However, the deployment of any stance is only loosely constrained, which is why we can take up a teleological stance towards inanimate objects and non-teleological processes — just as the sentimental pet owner (of which I am one) can take up a discursive stance towards non-sapient animals.
Lizzie,
Obligatory old joke: Don’t anthropomorphize the model — it doesn’t like it.
Utterly silly and erroneous. Durac’s Equation squashs any notion that any anything other than matter is pushing atoms around in any given system. Unless you can demonstrate some “unaccounted” for elements in given energy systems, there’s no reason to account for anything other thsn matter apparent. Why postulate the unnecessary?
That sounds a bit like the “program teleology” that the M&B paper attributes to Monod although that uses the genotype as the re-description of the history.
Do you think that the concept of intrinsic teleology is doing any scientific work? I understand its role in philosophy of biology. Also, maybe as a part of justifying/explaining a scientific research program based on enactivism, DST, and all the related ideas on the need to study evolution of whole organisms in their environments.
But is it part of any specific scientific work to your knowledge?
More on the Dennett stuff later.
The authors of the paper I wrote about want to restrict teleology to biological organisms, and rule out any non-living, homeostatic system. The authors have a subtler and more detailed description of the concepts of closure and constraints than I provided, and they claim those concepts do the work to restrict intrinsic teleology to life.
I’ll be honest — I’m not entirely on the distinction between a philosophical concept and a scientific concept!
That said, I don’t think that intrinsic teleology is doing any specifically scientific work. I say that because it is not part of a theoretical explanation. Instead I see as part of a conceptual explication of our experience of living things, and as such, it is part of the explanandum (what needs to be explained) rather than the explanans (what does the explaining).
The explanatory work would be undertaken by, say, autopoiesis theory (or something similar), which in turn would need to be situated in the context of complexity theory in order for us to understand the conditions of actualization of intrinsically purposive systems.
I lol’d
Robin said:
How does matter push atoms around?
Oh, I know this one! It sends out little angels. their little wings are exactly what is called for in the vacuum.
You might like to check out this book:
Purposiveness: Teleology Between Nature and Mind
The last chapter is a revised and abbreviated version of the paper you mention.
Table of Contents
Why else you might be interested:
keiths,
There is a significant and telling difference between the examples you have chosen as representative of what I have posted and what I have actually quoted and emphasized, which, for whatever reason, you actually failed to quote or cite.
Please do better.
Mung,
Yes, I’ve read Purposiveness. Quite good and very helpful. Thank you, though, for taking the time to bring it our attention!
KN, I don’t think I am willing to pay 40 bucks for that paper “What makes biological organisation teleological?” and I certainly don’t expect you to type anything up at length, but I am interested in anything you care to share from it as you are moved to do so.
In particular I am interested in reasons for rejecting immanent finality (intrinsic teleology) outside of living beings.
Thank you.
Mung,
And that “significant and telling difference” is…?
keiths,
The significant and telling difference is that I am quoting texts and highlighting how terms are defined. I am trying to help people see where I am coming from and trying to introduce them to ideas about teleology they have perhaps never come across before.
This is a far cry from your misrepresentation. I reviewed all my posts in this thread for bolded text and in no case did I do what you accused me of doing.
Of course, you can set us all straight by a simple comparison showing what I said, what you said I said, and how what I said actually committed the “error” you accused me of.
Mung:
I didn’t claim that you did it in this thread, Mung:
Exhibit A:
Definition of process.
1. a systematic series of actions directed to some end
Except I wasn’t highlighting every teleological word. I was highlighting what it meant to say that a process is teleological.
Except I wasn’t taking teleological language and trying to make a point from it.
Your entire enterprise is misguided.
LoL! ok. whatever.
KN, I think you gave up too easily on the question of the necessity and/or the utility of the teleological perspective wrt doing “scientific work.”.
Mung:
My “entire enterprise” was simply a reply to faded_Glory, using your past bolding behavior as an example of a common ID trope: a fixation on superficially teleological language as if it were evidence for ID.
It isn’t.
KN, when and if you re-read the Weber/Varela paper, check the references.
The word biosemiotics springs to mind. The horror!
I’m not too sure how helpful that is, for an outcome is defined as follows:
– something that happens as a result of an activity or process
So if I accidentally knock over my cup of coffee, that is certainly something that happens as a result of an activity, but in what sense is that outcome the result of a process?
If “anything that happens” can be said to be the result of a process then “process” becomes essentially meaningless. So I say that a process must have something that differentiates it from “it happened.” I think that is a reasonable stance to take.
In some sense I find myself in agreement here. I think that the outcome of a process must satisfy a precondition, else it is not a process, but merely an event or a sequence of events. An outcome, but not the outcome of a process.
What makes a process susceptible of teleological explanation is the regularity or repeatability. But then, as I have argued above, a non-repeatable process or a process that is not susceptible to prediction is hardly a process at all.
I disagree with Neil that an operating system has no purpose.
Now Neil, don’t go all DOS on me. Are you seriously going to argue that an operating system has a purpose but not a goal?
keiths,
But you somehow felt compelled to attach my name to it. And not only that, but to associate your mockery with my use of bolded text in this thread, as if I was engaged, here in this thread, in the activity you were mocking.
If that is not in fact the case, and wasn’t in fact your intent, then please retract your association of my name and my use of bolding in this thread from whatever point you were trying to make.
Do the right thing, keiths.
faded_Glory:
That’s right. All processes have outcomes, but they don’t all have goals or purposes.
Mung’s claim doesn’t hold up. Not all processes are teleological.
Mung:
I made no such association, so there is nothing to retract.
Though you probably wish I had, I did not accuse you of using bolding that way in this thread.
Whatever. I decline further comment due to my voluntary agreement to abide by the rules of this site.
Readers can judge for themselves:
keiths Mung bold no association
keiths,
The point I was making was that all processes have outcomes, but not all outcomes are due to processes. I don’t see how your comment addresses this.