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.
Neil,
The lattice is there whether or not we label it as ‘a salt crystal’. It’s a pattern.
There’s an old saying among mathematicians:
“A topologist is someone who cannot tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup.”
I’ll note that’s actually about donut and coffee cup as two-dimensional surfaces, not as solids.
The point is that all of the patterns that you might think would distinguish between a coffee cup and a donut — those patterns exist only because of human conventions. And the same can be said of the patterns that you see in a salt crystal.
Neil,
The patterns of crystalline lattices had effects long before humans existed. No one perceived those patterns, but they were there.
Real effects, real patterns.
We do not find patterns in raw reality. We find patterns in representations. And how we represent affects what patterns we find.
One man’s ellipses is another man’s cycles and epicycles.
Neil:
Neil,
We had a similar conversation back in September, when you asserted that:
That’s not correct.
Perhaps you should reread that discussion. In it I show that the distinction between “geocentric” and “heliocentric” is an objective one, not an arbitrary convention that we’ve imposed on reality.
Here’s an exchange from that thread:
Neil:
keiths:
I’m always amazed at how well ptolomaic armillary spheres actually work.
Lizzie,
Ptolemy’s model was brilliant, no doubt about it. Had the planets been bigger, or the distances shorter, so that the planetary disks, their relative sizes, and their phases were visible to the naked eye, I’m sure he would have figured it all out (though in that case, someone else would likely have beaten him to it).
That was your mistake. But I won’t waste my time arguing it.
The concept of orbits is a convention. Moons and planets certainly don’t describe circles or ellipses. From one point of view, they follow a corkscrew path. From their own point of view, they follow a straight line.
I looked through that again. It is comedy gold.
What you have really shown, is that you get different patterns. “Paths” should be a reference to the paths through the cosmos, not the paths that you plot in your representation.
So sure, you get different patterns, which supports the view that patterns are not human-independent features of reality.
Ninja’d by petrushka. 🙂
Indeed. And his “corkscrew” is a pretty good way of putting it.
The coordinate system is arbitrary, but the relative motion is not. It’s a pattern determined by the laws of physics, and it’s heliocentric because the sun is far more massive than the planets.
Perhaps what’s confusing you is that the choice of coordinate system is orthogonal to the actual pattern of relative motion. You can express heliocentric motion in either heliocentric or geocentric coordinates. Likewise, you can express geocentric motion in either heliocentric or geocentric coordinates.
If you do this, you find that the astronomical observations match the heliocentric model, not the geocentric model. It’s Astronomy 101, Neil. There is a reason that geocentrism is mocked by the scientifically literate.
The laws of physics are a human construct.
And which patterns are you referring to? The ellipses? The cycles and epicycles? The corkscrews?
I’m not the one who is confused here.
My disagreement is not with astronomy. It is with philosophy.
Well, I certainly felt I addressed your questions. You’ll have to address my response if you feel I’ve missed something.
Ok, I see what you are saying here. Science has never been good at answering such why questions. It is pretty much limited to descriptions of function. But personally, I’m good with such descriptions; they allow for a predictable approach to the world.
And no one has said the world is not predictable. But what does it mean for something to be predictable if not to show direction towards an end?
Is it a matter of necessary that an acorn become a mature oak? But it’s hardly a matter of pure chance either, for then an acorn could become anything at all. Try predicting that!
Thus there is no reason to exclude teleology from biology (or any other science).
Neil,
Your disagreement is with astronomy, and you are making a very basic error.
You wrote:
That’s incorrect, as any astronomer will tell you. Heliocentrism is an objective property of the solar system. Regardless of the coordinate system you choose, the solar system remains heliocentric.
It’s easy to see why:
1. The relative motions of the sun and the planets are governed by gravity.
2. Gravity is a function of the masses of the bodies and the distances between them.
3. The masses and distances between the bodies are independent of the coordinate system.
4. Therefore the gravitational forces are independent of the coordinate system.
5. Therefore the relative motion is unaffected by the choice of coordinate system.
6. The pattern of relative motion is determined by physics. It is human-independent and unaffected by the choice of coordinate system.
It’s still teleological, either way. 🙂
You seem to have changed the meaning of “heliocentrism” to be a statement about mass distribution.
I guess I should accept that as conceding the point.
Neil,
No, I’m using ‘heliocentrism’ in the standard way.
Do you understand your mistake?
You mistook a heliocentric coordinate system, which is merely a convention, for heliocentrism itself, which is an objective property of our solar system. The solar system remains heliocentric regardless of the coordinate system you apply to it, because it is gravity that makes it heliocentric, and gravity is oblivious to the coordinate system you choose. You could even choose a geocentric coordinate system, but the solar system would remain heliocentric.
The Copernican Revolution wasn’t a mere change of coordinate system, Neil — it was a genuine scientific revolution.
Yes. Attempting to debate you is a mistake.
I think this is called “moving the goalposts”.
This started when I said “One man’s ellipses is another man’s cycles and epicycles.” And now you are arguing a non-standard meaning of heliocentrism instead of patterns.
Dennett, in talking about “real patterns,” is perfectly way that many patterns are the result of how complex brains interpret their environments. The problem he’s interested in there is, how can we tell the difference between the patterns that are a result of our innate-and-acquired neuro-hermeneutics and which ones are not?
The fine-grained details about the debate between geocentrism and heliocentrism are a bit murky to me, but one point worth making here is that Copernicus was not a scientific realist, and Galileo was. For Copernicus, as I understand it, heliocentrism was just an assumption that made astronomical predictions easier to calculate. By contrast, Galileo insisted that heliocentrism was a more adequate model of reality than geocentrism was. I think that’s relevant to the issue that Neil Rickert and keiths are debating here.
Finally, it was pointed out in another thread that we can use the “Add Media” tool to upload PDFs to TSZ. Please let me know if you’d like me to upload any of the articles I’ve read lately on biology and teleology.
I like to begin with a different but related question:
Clearly it is both, but in different sense of “potential”. The acorn is potential squirrel food in the sense that there’s a possible state of affairs in which the acorn is eaten by a squirrel. No logical, mathematical, or physical laws would be violated if a squirrel were to eat the acorn.
But something more seems demanded of the thought that the acorn is a potential oak tree. That would seem to be something like the thought that acorn and oak tree are different stages of the life-history of the whole living organism. The development of the acorn to oak tree is teleological, in the sense that the process of becoming from acorn to oak is the sort of process that contributes to the likelihood that there will continue to be oak trees. (As Okrent argues, taking his cue from Aristotle, the ultimate goal of an organism is its own continued existence. Mossimo and Bich make the same point.)
Conversely, the squirrel’s act of eating the acorn is teleological with regard to the squirrel for the same reason — because eating acorns is one the activities that squirrels perform that contributes to the likelihood that there will continue to be squirrels.
I don’t completely follow your point about Dennett. I still understand him as trying to provide a basis for patterns in the believer and not rely solely on the intentional stance for their reality.
I’m interpreting him both directly and through the lens of Andy Clark’s Mindware. Clark agrees with some critics that Dennett may be open to charges of committing ascriptivism, that is saying that my beliefs only exist because someone has taken an intentional stance towards them. Further, Clark notes complaints that if my beliefs do have causal efficiency to affect someone else’s stance, then that is evidence to claim they are real somehow, and not only stance-dependent.
But neither Dennett nor Clark want to succumb to Fodor’s LOT view that mentalese sentences are the basis of the reality for beliefs.
Clark instead prefers micro, scattered (but concrete and real) causes underlying the behavior that the intentional stance finds its patterns in. This echoes Dennett’s “statistical effect of very many concrete minutiae” .
Of course, being Andy Clark, he points out that such scattered causes need not be solely in the brain or even brain/body.
As Dennett adds, we can then explain why we describe the aggregated results of these scattered causes by propositional attitudes by referring to the way they are filtered by the tool of language.
I’d appreciate that if they are not already available on the internet via straightforward search, academia.edu, or JSTOR (I do have access to JSTOR through my public library).
Fair enough. And I would agree that it is more adequate.
My position is that the preference for heliocentrism is a pragmatic choice rather than a truth based choice.
Neil,
No, the goalposts are right where they started.
You said:
In September, you tried to support that same claim by citing heliocentrism:
You added that heliocentrism was nothing more than a convention:
Each of your statements is false.
1. There are human-independent patterns, and the pattern of heliocentric motion is one of them. It is determined by physics, not by humans. The motion was heliocentric before humans existed, and it will be heliocentric after we are gone.
2. Geocentrism is irreconcilable with heliocentrism. You cannot get from geocentrism to heliocentrism by a mere change of coordinate system. Geocentrism remains geocentrism, and heliocentrism remains heliocentrism, regardless of the coordinate system in which each is expressed.
3. Heliocentrism is not a convention. You are confusing the choice of a heliocentric coordinate system, which is a convention, with heliocentrism itself, which is not.
Geocentrism is correctly regarded as a crackpot idea, on a par with flat-earthism, while heliocentrism is taught to children as settled science, and rightly so. Galileo made his Venus observations 400 years ago and geocentrism has been dead ever since.
Join us in the 21st century, Neil. Failing that, could you at least make a leap into the 17th century, after the point where Galileo made his decisive observations?
One aspect of your view that I’ve never really understood is that you seem to stress some distinction between “pragmatic choice” and “truth-based choice”. I like to think of myself as a pragmatist, but I see truth, in the sense of adequatio intellectus et rei (the adequacy of intellect and reality) as itself pragmatic. The adequacy is, of course, provisional and tentative (not absolute). And it is established through the complex transactions between our brains, bodies, technologies, institutions, social practices, languages, and environments, not in some quasi-mystical attunement of the pure (disembodied) intellect and the pure world-in-itself.
In short, I think that one can translate truth-talk into pragmatism, rather than rejecting truth-talk in favor of pragmatism. But I suspect that you disagree, and I’d like to know why.
Ponder this illustration to see why Galileo’s observations were so decisive:
(Moderators, could one of you embed the image? Thanks.)
BruceS,
Thank you for bringing that bit of Clark to my attention. I read Being There when it first came out, before I really knew much philosophy, and thought it was superb. I have Mindware but haven’t read it yet. I’ll make sure I look for his discussion of Dennett.
The only point I was trying to make is that the intentional stance does pick out real patterns — and so too does the teleological stance and the nomological-mechanistic stance, plus whatever other stances there might be. (I myself think that the design stance was co-opted from the teleological stance during the evolution of hominid tool-making, but that’s a big claim.)
What we might want — at any rate, what I do want! — from the synthesis of pragmatism, phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences is an explanation of the mechanisms whereby the different stances represent real patterns in different ways. The interesting thing about sentient animals is that relatively stable regularities (and irregularities) are coupled to perception and action such as to show up as affordances for those animal — and for rational animals, those affordances include reasons, beliefs, desires, etc.
Thanks for the interesting exchange, KN.
I find Clark’s views on philosophy of mind the most congenial.
I plan to spend some time with his predictive brains paper and Friston’s stuff over the summer as well as Hohwy’s book.
.
BruceS,
You might want to keep an eye out for Clark’s new book, coming out in November: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. And thank you for reminding me about Hohwy’s book. I saw it for the first time in a bookstore not long ago, but I was far from home and didn’t want to be carrying it around for the remainder of my trip.
I very much doubt that I said that. It is certainly not in the quote that you gave.
I am far more likely to have said that it is nothing less than a pragmatic convention.
Sorry, but the rest of your comment is nonsense.
keiths:
Neil:
The quote in question:
Fercrissakes, Neil. The readers here aren’t idiots.
Neil:
Refute it, then.
I see an important distinction between the two, and I see it as central to understanding human cognition.
Then I think you will always be deeply committed to theism and dualism, while probably in denial over both.
I see truth as pragmatic. That is, I see our use of “truth” as a pragmatic invention. But I can’t equate that to the adequacy question. I see it as an important part of what makes truth useful, is that it can disagree with our pragmatic judgments. Consistency, rather than adequacy, seems more central to truth.
To a first approximation, we judge truth in terms of standards. And I see our adoption of standards as pragmatic.
Quite right. They can clearly see that you inserted the words “nothing more” and falsely attributed them to me.
Some of us, however, are IDiots.
Robin said:
The point, Robin, is that there are, ultimately, no “material” explanations or known causes; there are only mechanistic descriptions. We cannot say what causes those mechanistic behaviors. The assertion that all known causes are material is thus shown to be based on erroneous semantics generated by a false equivalence of “description of events” (model) with “cause of events” (cause).
Now, the question is, are all known descriptions mechanistic? No. One might assume that somehow mechanistic models can eventually account for what are now non-mechanistic behaviors (intentional teleology), but that is not now known, and there is good reason to doubt (I think EL agrees here) that all behaviors can be sufficiently described mechanistically.
So – ultimately – no causes are known to be material or mechanistic themselves and not all known behavior (currently, and perhaps ever) can be mechanistically modeled.
I have a different question. Does the squirrel think of the acorn as vegetable, as meat, or as something like ice cream?
Isn’t Dawkins’ Selfish Gene concept entirely teleological?
I don’t recall whether you’ve taken any sort of explicit stance previously in this thread on whether the evolutionary process itself is teleological. How is that process not teleological in the same sense you are using the term teleological in your post?
Contributes to the likelihood that there will continue to be ______.
You’re actually taking teleology further than I’ve been willing to do (so far). I still want to know if there is a more fundamental level of teleology. The oak is “that for the sake of which” the acorn is in potential. The mature oak is the potential form and the telos. It is that by which we can understand “why acorns.”
There’s nothing mysterious about teleology. It is necessary for understanding, and science could not do without it. (Certainly not biology!). I am thinking of working up something on “hypothetical necessity.” This relates to my assertion that there is a goal of a hammer and not merely a purpose. A hammer cannot fulfill the purpose of a hammer absent a proper form suited to it’s function/purpose, and that form has to be the goal of any hammer. Else hammer is meaningless.
I appreciate your offer to post papers. I have lots of material still to go through that already admits to teleology (at least in some sense) in biology. But if you have something that address the question of teleology in physics or chemistry, prior to biology, I would definitely be interested. I think I have been sort of weak making a case for that. May have to haul our Oderberg and put him to work. 🙂
Anyways, thanks to you and BruceS and the others who have managed to make meaningful contributions.
Well, duh. You moved them back.
I hate to get off topic, lol, but so many subjects intersect things I am reading.
Do you think either Aristotle or Aquinas held to a pure (disembodied) intellect and the pure world-in-itself? If not, who are some philosophers who did?
I mean my first reaction when I read that was, who thinks the world is “pure world-in-itself”? You’re probably using that in some sense other than that which I am taking it. So an example. There are no perfect circles in the world. The world as we encounter it is not the Pure world.
p.s. I was thinking of launching a new OP on mind brain and computer, but can barely keep up with the current lot.
So just some links I’ve been collecting:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/02/popper-contra-computationalism.html
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/05/kripke-contra-computationalism.html
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511780622&cid=CBO9780511780622A024
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/whats_behind_th097251.html
Mung,
No. It’s teleonomic, not teleological.
This comment from September is still applicable, and it’s a good way of ending this surreal discussion with Neil:
keiths on September 29, 2014 at 5:16 pm said:
Neil,
Right, and the relative positions do not change merely because you express them in a different coordinate system.
Yes, and the geocentric model predicts them incorrectly, just as it predicts thousands of other things incorrectly. That’s why geocentrists go into the “crackpot” category with the flat earthers.
We wouldn’t call them crackpots if their only offense were to choose a different coordinate system!
Heliocentrism vs. geocentrism is not just a matter of convenience. The Apollo missions would have killed a lot of astronauts if they had been flown under the assumptions of the geocentric model, even if the calculations had been done perfectly. Heliocentrism works for planning space missions, while the geocentric model — even when correctly applied — is a total bust.
Are we actually having this conversation in the year 2014, or am I dreaming?
That makes no sense. Physics is teleonomic.
Sorry, Mung. If you’re unwilling to make an effort, I’m not going to help you out.
keiths,
I really don’t know what point you think you are making.
At the time Copernicus came out with his heliocentric model, the geocentric model was making better predictions. This is documented by Kuhn, in his book on the topic.
For sure, the heliocentric model is much improved by today. But you could take the modern heliocentric model, do a coordinate change, and map that to a much improved geocentric model.
Nobody bothers to do this, of course, because the heliocentric model clearly has other advantages.
This forum/blog is supposed to be a place for thoughtful discussion. It isn’t supposed to be a place where people are falsely made out to be old fashioned geocentrists. In my opinion, your have been violating the sites rules.
Neil,
I have thoughtfully addressed your statements throughout the thread (as summarized here), but we can’t have a “thoughtful discussion” unless you respond thoughtfully to my criticisms.
Curtly dismissing them as “nonsense” without actually responding to them is the antithesis of thoughtfulness.
The ball’s in your court. Can you defend your claims against my criticisms?