Choice in Dying

And this is an example of Feser taking Rhetorical Option 1 from my post in the previous thread. He believes his point to be self evident, so when people don’t agree with it, he just re-explains it in hopes that this time you will understand and it will become self evident to you.

I’d say that eyes or kidneys were a bit too complex to make really good examples. Instead, I would consider the example of nylon-eating bacteria:

A particular kind of bacterium can, if it undergoes a particular fairly simple frame-shift mutation, produce a protein that has a completely novel structure (frame-shift mutations work that way). The chances are that this happens occasionally in all populations, and if you analyzed one of these mutants and tried to determine the function of the protein, you’d conclude that it didn’t have one, since it doesn’t participate in any reactions with any other chemical the bacterium contains or typically comes into contact with.

But if one of these bacteria finds itself in a pool of industrial nylon production waste, it turns out that the mutant protein can catalyze a reaction that converts one of the chemicals used in nylon production into something that the bacterium can use as food. It isn’t a very effective enzyme as these things go, but it works well enough for the bacterium to survive in places where it otherwise wouldn’t.

So in this example it’s clear that “function” can’t be associated with the mutation (because the mutation was randomly occurring even before any nylon existed); no function exists until both the mutation and the new nylon-rich environment exist in the same place. After that, then saying that the “function” of the new protein is to process nylon chemicals into food is merely a description of a process that occurs, where there is clearly no “intent” or “purpose” present.

Notice that none of this actually involves natural selection yet, so we’re not appealing to selection as the cause of “function” as applied to the mutant protein. Of course, selection will tend to ensure that further mutations that improve the efficiency of reaction will be likely to be preserved in bacterial populations that have colonized nylon waste pools (and in fact these populations have evolved multiple new enzymes, but I’m focusing on just one where the details of the original mutation are known).

I think that Feser misrepresents Dennett here, when he takes Dennett as claiming that “The function of organ X is Y” means “X was favored by natural selection because it allowed organisms to do Y.”

Throughout _Darwin’s Dangerous Idea_, in fact, Dennett claims that we can independently deduce the functions of parts of evolved systems. Looking through the index of DDI on “function,” I don’t see any place where he defines function this way, and in fact, he claims that function can be inferred without knowledge of evolutionary history. (This is the point of his discussion of reverse engineering, and of his approving citation of Paley’s observation to the extent that all the creatures around us really do seem to be well designed for their functions.)

Does footnote 29 actually show that Dennett (or anybody!) defines function this way? Or is Feser making stuff out of whole cloth? Or is Feser inferring what Dennett _ought_ to mean, and just speaking very loosely?

I kind of suspect the latter. A guy who talks about “the gene for kidneys” is not somebody who feels a serious duty to speak precisely about biology.

Surely if we had a number of live swampman specimens available for vivisection (and no ethical qualms!), we could remove hearts, kidneys, limbs, etc, and see what happens. We could even compare results with a control group of humans treated in a similar way (again, assuming we have no ethics). After observing the resulting deficits — blood doesn’t circulate, toxins build up, mobility is reduced — it seems quite reasonable to me to label the deficits as the “function” of whatever organ we had removed (at least on the first pass). And yet we have appealed only to the efficient causes that, working together, keeps the organism alive.

In addition to equivocating between “function” and “purpose”, as Geoff Arnold above points out, the guy doesn’t seem to understand evolution theory. Does he seriously believe kidneys popped into existence out of nowhere, and only then will natural selection start acting on them?

It is indeed unfortunate that even many supporters of evolution can’t help but talk about it in terms of purpose. That’s the only grain of truth I could find in there. But that’s just an unfortunate human tendency, very similar in nature to our habit of anthropomorphizing animal behavior. It doesn’t mean there really is purpose in evolution.

It doesn’t deprive us of using teleological language to describe Man, just of Swampman. Feser takes it as obvious that Swampman’s systems have the same functions as ours. The causal historicist says that while they both do the same thing (function the same in the efficient cause sense), they differ in teleology since Swampman has no evolutionary history and we do. Swampman’s kidneys aren’t “for anything”. Feser doesn’t give any argument that Man and Swampman are the same in teleology. Instead he just say “Surely they do”. When someone uses the word surely, that’s a sign that they don’t have any better arguments to back up their brute intuition.

I really am getting a bit fed up with the claim that I have misrepresented Feser’s “argument.”

Complex issue and poorly defined – and comprehended – terms tend to muddle the issue – which sometimes even the best wills in the world are unable to surmount. But allow me to make a stab at clarifying things.

For starters – justifying, to some extent, your comments about Feser “simply repeating what he’s already said” – he asserts that:

Another absurd implication [of this theory] is that nothing that didn’t evolve could possibly have a biological function

And further he later goes on to say – “repeating what he’s already said” – that:

But the theory in question would have to deny that they have any function at all, given that swampman was not the product of natural selection.

To me that appears to be a serious misunderstanding of the phrase “natural selection” and, by implication, the essentials of evolutionary theory itself. My understanding is that natural selection itself is only the process whereby variations – created by random mutations or by self-organization (Stuart Kauffman’s ‘order-for-free’) – are simply “winnowed-out” by environmental processes. In other words, natural selection only disposes – or keeps – what self-organization and mutations propose – in the felicitous phrasing of the paper “Visions of Evolution”.

And, by that token, it is not at all implausible that some biological structure could have a function without it first having been the object of natural selection – as a matter of fact, it would seem to be impossible to be otherwise.

In addition, Mr. Feser – apparently relying too heavily on Searle and Fodor – also misunderstands the relevance of teleology to evolutionary theory – although one might suggest that he is in good company in that regard – which he, again, seems to regard as synonymous with natural selection. For instance he asserts that:

The main problem with the theory in question, however, is the one emphasized by John Searle, namely that natural selection simply has nothing whatsoever to do with teleology or natural functions …

But the Wikipedia article on the “Four Causes” of Aristotle notes the importance and centrality of teleology to the theory:

It has been argued that explanations in terms of final causes remain common in modern science, including contemporary evolutionary biology, and that teleology is indispensable to biology in general for (among other reasons) the very concept of adaptation is teleological in nature. In an appreciation of Charles Darwin published in Nature in 1874, Asa Gray noted “Darwin’s great service to Natural Science” in bringing back to Teleology “so that, instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology”. Darwin quickly responded, “What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noticed the point.” Francis Darwin and T. H. Huxley reiterate this sentiment. The latter wrote that “..the most remarkable service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both, which his view offers.” James G. Lennox states that Darwin uses the term ‘Final Cause’ consistently in his Species Notebook, Origin of Species and after.

However, the question as to whether the “universe” itself is teleological is somewhat of a more intractable problem. In which regard I don’t see that your statement “He claims to be showing that teleology is irreducible” is the same as his assertion that “the human mind is the example par excellence of an irreducibly teleological phenomenon” – something for which I have a great amount of sympathy: seems hard to deny that an essence – first or fifth – of humans, if not all biology – is that we recognize that if we wish to have bread on the table tomorrow then we must plant wheat today – the essential paradigm of teleology.

Are you saying that, in the absence of minds, animals do not have organs and parts that perform functions?

Seems to me that the highly problematic issue and question there is what is the nature of a mind. One might reasonably argue, I think, that “mind” is a set or a spectrum, a distinguishing feature of which some essential teleology, and that it exists over a very broad spectrum of biological behaviour.

You might wish to review Stuart Hameroff’s paper, “Did Consciousness Cause the Cambrian Explosion” which has this:

One possible advantage of consciousness for natural selection is the ability to make choices. As Margulis and Sagan (1995) observe (echoing similar, earlier thoughts by Erwin Schrödinger), ” If we grant our ancestors even a tiny fraction of the free will, consciousness, and culture we humans experience, the increase in [life's] complexity on Earth over the last several thousand million years becomes easier to explain: life is the product not only of blind physical forces but also of selection in the sense that organisms choose. . .” (Scott, 1996).

Mr MacDonald (and everyone else),

I appreciate that in this thread the discussion here has at last taken a more substantive turn. I would like to make three points:

First, unfortunately, you folks still seem to be laboring under the false impression that what I was criticizing in the section of the book in question are evolutionary explanations in biology. That is not the case. As I have said many times, what is at issue are certain philosophical analyses of the concept of biological function (in particular, the sort defended by Ruth Millikan). That there are serious conceptual issues here is evident from your reactions. Though you’re mostly all on the same philosophical page, some of you seem to think Searle is obviously right and others that he is obviously wrong! The reason, I submit, is that naturalists tend both to be officially committed to the view that there is no real teleology in nature, and yet in practice find that teleological language is indispensable. The question is whether this conflict can be resolved in a way consistent with naturalism. I argue in the book that it cannot be — that at the very least some sort of teleology, as an objective feature of reality and not a mere heuristic, cannot be eliminated. And the kind in question is not Paley’s teleology, but Aristotle’s. (Whether this teleology requires a divine explanation is, as I emphasize in the book, a separate issue. I think so, but there are Aristotelians who do not.)

Second, Mr MacDonald’s misrepresentations of my book are by no means limited to this issue. They are many, and they are grave. I have documented this in the two most recent posts on MacDonald at my blog. You’ll find the most recent here:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/08/final-word-on-eric-macdonald.html

I do not believe Mr MacDonald has consciously attempted to smear and misrepresent me. But all the same, he has in fact done so. I believe the reason is that his personal animosity toward Catholicism is so very great that he finds it difficult to give a book like mine a fair reading. And its polemical tone seems to him to give him an excuse not to try.

But third, as to the tone of the book, while Mr MacDonald has, it seems, succeeded in getting many of you to think I am some sort of moral monster, I ask you to consider that the polemics of the book are directed only at New Atheist writers like Dawkins and Co — who themselves initiated the polemics — and not (contrary to what MacDonald has falsely claimed) at atheists generally. I also ask you to consider that my aggressive tone with MacDonald himself was taken only after he first compared me to Heinrich Himmler. (And if you read his original Himmler post you will see that it was indeed me, and not the pope, who was compared to Himmler.)

In the most recent post at my blog I discuss the issue of polemics more generally and show, I think, that my use of them has been justified and that MacDonald’s complaints about them have been hypocritical and (more to the point) entail a fallacy of special pleading.

In this particular case, no selection appears necessary to produce the function; the mutation almost certainly occurs occasionally in all populations of the bacterium, it’s just normally selected against. Only in the novel environment does it actually do anything.

I’m certainly not saying that the mutation is “for” anything. What I’m saying is that it is clear in this case that when one talks about the “function” of the mutant protein, it’s simply a description of what it happens to do in a particular combination of circumstances.

In what way is this an argument about the advantage of consciousness or the nature of mind?

My turn to say sorry [:-)]: sorry, but by “this” you mean what? Hameroff’s paper? And I hope you’ll excuse me for asking this, but did you read at least some of that article since it would seem to answer that question if that is in fact what you meant by “this”.

But if “this” is Hameroff’s paper then it would seem that you’re missing the point that he – and Sagan [son, I think, not Carl] and Margulis and Schrödinger (excuse the argument from authority but to me it does seem plausible, that it hangs together) – are trying to make since you’re asking: “All I asked was this. Suppose no conscious, reason using brain had evolved here on earth.” And, more specifically, the point is that the “conscious, reason using brain” – all terms very broadly defined – was present in the amoeba, in eukaryotic cells, the worms of the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian era – if not earlier.

Unless I misunderstand “where you’re coming from” which is, of course, entirely possible.

Thanks for your reply. And I suspect that you are quite a nice person in your non-polemical everyday persona too. If we are ever in the same place, I would be happy to buy you a drink and hash things out in a more relaxed and human setting than the internet!

But I do not think I misrepresented you at all. You quoted some words from my book, and then said that the views expressed in them reminded you of Himmler and his views. Perhaps you think there is a significant difference between “You think like Himmler” and “You are comparable to Himmler.” I don’t see it.

Nor is the Himmler comparison by any means the end of it. In my most recent post I document a number of other very personally abusive remarks you have made about me — almost all before I said anything nasty about you.

Now, we all say things in the heat of the moment. Totally forgivable. The reason I raise the issue is, first, because I believe you have been inconsistent in holding me to a standard to which you do not hold yourself; and second, because while I have no problem at all with disagreement — as readers of my blog know, I moderate it almost not at all, and let stand even the most abusive venom directed at me — I do not appreciate being personally demonized, and I really really don’t like having my views misrepresented.

I understand that you are very firmly opposed to Catholic morality and that you think you have good reasons for saying that its implications are monstrous. Fair enough. Obviously I disagree, but it would be unfair of me to pretend that your opposition to Catholic morality entails that you think all Catholics themselves are monstrous.

What I am asking for is the same consideration. I have indeed said that atheism (or more precisely, the naturalistic metaphysics that underlies modern atheism) has immoral and irrational implications. But I have never said — in fact in my book I explicitly deny — that all atheists themselves are personally immoral and irrational. And yet I now find this meme going around to the effect that I dismiss all my critics a priori as evil and irrational. That is a smear, and I submit that I have a right to respond to it vigorously.

This sounds like cuckoo-for-cocoa puffs speculation. I don’t understand why people get excited about stuff like this. Isn’t real biology interesting enough without needing to go off into Deepak Chopra land?

“Or at least it would be if it so obviously were not. One rather absurd implication of this theory is that you can’t really know what the function of an organ is until you know something about its evolutionary history.”
This is a limitation of us as observers, not the process itself. We’re trying to reconstruct the past from the present, so of course we have this limitation. There’s a lot of hypothetical Ps that could explain Q and all we have is Q.

Observations and experiments in real time, however, show that the process works. And if we even reflect for a moment on the process itself, there shouldn’t be any reason to think that odd.

Daniel Lafave said: This sounds like cuckoo-for-cocoa puffs speculation. I don’t understand why people get excited about stuff like this. Isn’t real biology interesting enough without needing to go off into Deepak Chopra land?

Yes, I will quite accept that “real biology” is incredibly interesting – with a great many far-reaching consequences to all of us as individuals and as a society. However, I’m also reminded of Dawkins’ assertion – in The Selfish Gene – that the process by which consciousness arose during evolution, if not consciousness itself, “is the most profound mystery facing modern biology” [pg 59].

In addition, I hardly think that the detailed understanding of biology and the physics of those like Hameroff and Penrose, not to mention that which went into the paper described in Discover I mentioned earlier, can in any way, shape or form be compared with “Deepak Chopra land”.

And finally, as mentioned earlier, that mystery seems very much related to the teleology that Dr. Feser has been promoting. While I have very strong reservations about the harnessing of that, and the related metaphysics, to the “mumbo-jumbo” of the Catholic Church – its morality and its dogmata – that does not detract from, in my view, the fact that those perspectives of his may have some significant relevance and utility in solving that mystery.

Eric MacDonald said: No, by “this” I meant the whole discussion that we’re having about Feser’s argument posted above. I’m not sure how consciousness fits into this, It may do, but I just didn’t see the point that you were trying to make by talking about the evolution of consciousness.

You started this thread by noting that Dr. Feser claims to have shown that “the human mind is the example par excellence of an irreducibly teleological phenomenon” which you seem to think is synonymous with “he claims to be showing that teleology is irreducible” – a misunderstanding I think, although there are some problematic nuances to the point. But you then followed that up with a request for some elucidation which I endeavored to provide.

And specifically he has argued, in a post from him herein more or less echoing or underlining some of his statements from his book that you quoted, that:

The question is whether this conflict can be resolved in a way consistent with naturalism. I argue in the book that it cannot be — that at the very least some sort of teleology, as an objective feature of reality and not a mere heuristic, cannot be eliminated.

And as a way of explaining and justifying his contention – as part of the process of trying to answer your question – I endeavored to show that consciousness – whose central and constitutive essence would appear to be teleology – is part and parcel of the evolutionary process and hence something that lends some support to his argument that “teleology, as an objective feature of reality and not a mere heuristic, cannot be eliminated”.

Q.E.D.

Although, of course, I could be misinterpreting some of his statements and at this point, not having read too much from this perspective, I don’t see the difference between “Paley’s teleology and Aristotle’s”, although I think the distinction is worth pursuing.

Leaving aside issues of polemics and rudeness and the Himmler analogy…

Part of them problem here is that you target a small handful of views and proceed make gross generalizations about naturalism. Whether or not you’ve given a fair overview of Dennett and Millikan*, there are other naturalist accounts that don’t work this way — Cummins comes to mind** — so your point is far more limited than you lead your readers to believe. In fact, it’s not an indictment of naturalism — or at least it doesn’t show that on all naturalist accounts teleology is snuck in a back door — but of Millikan’s and Dennett’s particular views. It shows, at most, that Dennett and Millikan sneak in teleology not that “some sort of teleology, as an objective feature of reality and not a mere heuristic, cannot be eliminated”.

*I haven’t read either for some time so I can’t weigh in there. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say you have done so.

**See, e.g., Cummins’ “Neo-teleology” at https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rcummins/www/HomePage/Papers/NeoTeleology.pdf (no pay wall for those unattached to educational institutions). Granted, he’s talking about what he calls “Paley Questions” but it doesn’t mean that he’s talking about Paley teleology — he explicitly says, actually, that the teleology he addresses doesn’t aswer Paley Questions. In fact, he responds to precisely the kind of arguments you express in the long passage Eric has quoted in the OP above. His argument has problems — certainly, I don’t want to ignore that — but that this discussion is even going on in the background doesn’t even seem to be on your philosohical radar (again, working from what’s quoted above).

Daniel, please see the above response to Eric.

Feser is doing the same thing with teleology that many Christian apologists do with morality, which is to argue that there is either an absolute Teleology with a capital T or there can be no such thing at all. Most academics have long ago relinquished such simplistic thinking, but Feser religious obsession with absolutes, maximums and ultimates prohibits him from recognizing emergent phenomena.

Neither lifeforms nor their organs have any ultimate idealized Purpose. A thing’s purpose is inseparable from its function, which is inseparable from its form, which is inseparable from what it is. A life form does not intend to make copies of itself and reproduce. A life form is something that makes copies of itself and reproduces. A kidney does not wish to clean blood. It is an organ which cleans blood. Evolutionary biologists often use language which conveys intentionality because humans are biased to think in such relationships, but scientists also recognize that this artificial schema is a projection of the human mind onto nature and inherent within nature itself. If Searle objects to using teleological language in biological description of the natural world, it’s only because he knows theologians like Feser are all too eager to pervert such casual descriptions beyond their intended usage. Scientists are quite used to creationists and dishonest apologists intentionally misreading their words.

Fesser writes:

“One rather absurd implication of this theory is that you can’t really know what the function of an organ is until you know something about its evolutionary history.”

One cannot be certain what all the functions of an organ is until one knows it’s history. This is not an absurdity, but a recognition of the fact that organs often have more than one purpose or have changed purposes over time. Again, it’s only Feser’s own intellectual limitations which cause him to reduce the issue to a binary choice — either an organ must have some Ultimate Purpose or purpose becomes an absurd concept, which is clearly untrue. A bear’s paw has the purpose of supporting it’s weight and aiding in ambulation. A bear’s paw also has the purpose of digging up food. A bear’s paw also the purpose of swatting enemies and prey. What is the ultimate Purpose of the bear’s paw? It’s a nonsensical question because it assumes there must be a single answer. The bear’s paw serves different functions in different contexts. It has no Purpose, only purposes.

Feser’s confusion is further illustrated by the his example of the swampman. Leaving aside the fact that complex organisms cannot spontaneously appear in reality and thus are an artificial dilemma, he dishonestly slips his conclusion into his premises. If the swampman is directly analogous to humans, then his organs will be as well. But that’s hardly saying anything at all, since Feser begins with the premise of a creature whose physiology is identical to an organism which already has an evolutionary history. But if the Swamp Man were truly unique, then obviously much less could be confidently inferred about the organs which comprise it. Perhaps it has a tongue used for smelling instead of tasting, as snakes. Or perhaps its coloration functions as both camouflage and a sexual display. We can’t be certain until we observe it interacting with its environment. And such traits do depend on the organism’s history. That’s because animals can be thought of as bundles of responses to the various selection pressures which have inextricably shaped them. Things are what they have evolved to do. Lacking such a history, Feser’s swampman must necessarily lack form. But since he has decided to magically imbued his monster with form, Feser is forced to steal it from an organism which already has an evolution history. Rather than demonstrating the illogicality of deriving function from form, Feser has actually demonstrated the impossibility of trying to separate the two.

In truth, Feser’s arguments are not very different from the IDers like Dembski who also see teleology in everything. Feser might complain about the comparison because he’s on record as rejecting their arguments, but he certainly accepts their premises.

Hm. My first asterisk seems to have wandered. Sorry for any confusion.

Would you be willing to provide a concrete application of the notion that teleology of some sort is an inherent feature of nature to something relatively simple, say the structure of a honeycomb, for us neophytes who have dissertations to write on other topics and don’t have the time currently to pick your book? So far most of this discussion has been a little hard to follow for people with just a little background in philosophy, I suspect because of the lingo and not because of the difficulty of the concepts.

H.H. I think this pretty much sums it up. Well said.

I understand that you object to any grand Purposes in nature. But what about ordinary purposes, such as the ones that you mentioned, e.g. the purpose of the paw is to swat prey? Are those acceptable instances of teleology in nature? Or is that also an imposition of the human mind?

I agree with you, and so does Feser. He argues that Searle is wrong, because if functions are not really present in nature, then functions cannot be present in any scientific theory of nature, because that which does not exist cannot influence that which does exist. And the problem is that without the use of functional explanations in biology, then biology becomes completely empty and useless.

Another Matt,

Sure. Let me take a very simple example that “new essentialist” philosophers of the sort referred to above like to use, viz. the brittleness of glass. This is a “dispositional” property in the sense that for glass to be brittle is just for it to have a disposition, under certain triggering circumstances, to shatter. Shattering is the paradigmatic manifestation of the brittleness.

Now teleology fits in here as follows. The glass has this disposition long before it shatters and even whether or not it ever in fact shatters. And that means that the dispositional property “points to” or is “directed at” the outcome of shattering, specifically, at all times in which the glass exists. In that sense the dispositional property has an “end” beyond itself. And the idea is that we can’t make sense of what it is for the glass to have this causal property unless we recognize this “directedness” in it.

Now there are several complications that enter in. We need to spell out, for example, what the circumstances are under which the manifestation would be triggered if we are to have a rigorous description of exactly what the nature of the disposition is. There are also other dispositions a thing might have, or the disposition may be a disposition toward a certain range of effects rather than one effect. It might turn out that a certain apparent dispositional property reduces to a non-dispositional one. And so forth. But what new essentialists and Aristotelians argue is that at some level, and particularly the bottom level of physical causation, there will necessarily be certain dispositional properties. Otherwise the existence of any causation at all would be unintelligible. (This is why Humean puzzles about causation soon entered into Western philosophy after final causality — built-in, unconscious “directedness” — was thrown out, as I argue in the book.)

One of the things thinkers in these camps differ about is how many (if any) irreducible teleological properties exist above the level of basic physical causation. Some would say they exist only at the fundamental physical level. Some might take it as high as chemistry. Some might take it as high as the genetic level. Some would take it to higher levels still — the higher one takes it, you might say, the more thoroughgoing is one’s Aristotelianism.

Biological teleology — the sort of thing that “function” talk us needed to describe — is on this view only a special case, and a more complex case, of what at bottom is a very simple phenomenon: unconscious, built-in “pointing to” or being “directed at” a certain end.

Daniel:

In the swamp man thought experiment, the swamp man is biologically identical to a human being down to having DNA, cells, and having the same bodily organization. In other words, a pathologist would not be able to tell the difference between swamp man and a real man.

Given those conditions, does it make sense to say that swamp man’s heart does not pump blood through the circulatory system? One can do an ECHO, and see the cardiac contractions, can do a nuclear scan and actually see the heart pumping blood, but according to the view that Feser is arguing against, none of this would be relevant to demonstrate swamp man’s heart”s function, because he lacks an evolutionary history.

Since this is clearly absurd, the conclusion — if you buy into the thought experiment at all — is that saying that if X has no evolutionary history, then X has no function, is just false.

“If you agree with the latter, then you are stuck with the difficult task of explaining how nature works without mentioning purposes, goals or ends at all, because even if you mention the slightest hint of teleology into your account, then you are actually on board with Feser.”
It’s quite easy to explain how nature is able to build without any purposes or goals or ends at all. Why do we have some rocks sharp, or other rocks smooth? They’re that way because of forms of erosion – no purpose or goals or ends, just particles interacting with other particles from which structure is altered.

The evolutionary process is interesting in that purposes, goals, or ends are emergent from the process. If one follows the evolutionary algorithm, it should be apparent why this is. A mutation that makes an organism harder to distinguish from the background is means that organism is less likely to end up as prey, and thus copies of that mutated gene will spread through generations. Mutations that make the organism even harder to spot will likewise have that same benefit as far as the genetic material. Thus over time, camouflage will emerge without any purpose or goal or ends.

Either you agree that teleology is a part of nature or that it is a byproduct of our minds projecting upon nature. If you agree with the former, then Feser will agree with you and there is no conflict. If you agree with the latter, then you are stuck with the difficult task of explaining how nature works without mentioning purposes, goals or ends at all, because even if you mention the slightest hint of teleology into your account, then you are actually on board with Feser.

If we believe teleology to be imposed, why must we also be stuck with the “difficult” task of never mentioning it without somehow inadvertently proving Feser correct? That’s a preposterous precondition. There is no contradiction between employing teleology language when it is useful in communicating ideas and also recognizing it as a human construct.

Earlier you asked be about examples of teleology in nature and whether they are imposed or inherent to nature. The answer is it’s both. There is the thing as it is, and then there is our conception of it. It’s like asking whether a “species” is a human concept or something which actually exists in nature. Obviously, there are all kinds of animals, each different from each other. Humans only came along and put a name to that already existing pattern. But what is a species, exactly? Believe it or not, there is no single definition. While there is this pattern, this relationship between related lifeforms that really exists in nature, it is in some sense beyond our abilities to fully articulate it. For every definition that is offered, some exception or can be found to upset our list of rules. So we have the abstraction, the concept of a species as a specific kind of animal, yet we also recognize that nature is not so clear cut.

Or take the color blue. Obviously the wavelength of light we call the color blue exists naturally, but it’s also a human concept. If we look at the visible spectrum we see a rainbow where each color blends into another. Yellow turns to green turns to blue turns to purple turns to red. But where does one color stop and the next begin? Where is the edge of “blue?” What are it’s boundaries? Can you name the exact wavelength when blue stops being blue and becomes green? If we cannot say, it nature’s fuzzy boundaries defy our abilities to firmly classify it, does that mean the word blue can have no meaning? Is it an “absurdity” to speak of blue things? No, we simply recognize that “blueness” is both found in nature and is also a concept we project upon nature.

Consider us simians. Unlike nearly every other animal, we don’t manufacture our own ascorbic acid, but instead depend upon a dietary source. We require it for our survival, but since our ancestors for millions of years had fresh food available at all times, we survived the mutation that rendered us unable to synthesize it ourselves.

Unlike every other mammal, most of us primates have decent color vision, recovering a capability which was almost certainly ancestral to our kind, but a dispensable luxury to our nocturnal or crepuscular progenitors.

People who are color-blind, who can’t spot an apple any more easily than a dog can (they do see color, of course, just a narrower range) aren’t actually terribly disadvantaged.

It’s a bit silly to talk about purpose in this concatenation of accidents, some helpful but not strictly necessary, some harmful but not often a problem.

Then I think this whole argument is fundamentally about an equivocation between “function” (defined as the role that something plays in a larger system, or equivalently the set of interactions between the thing and its environment) and “purpose” (defined as the intent for which something was created).

The nylonase enzyme shows that new functions can arise without any need for selection pressure or any “design-like” activities, and as a purely random physical occurrence it is clearly not intentional in any sense. More complex organs like kidneys are merely the end result of a hugely long chain of similar occurrences but where selection has been applied.

That much of our language seems to impute purposes where none exist is simply a reflection of our well-understood cognitive biases – and because our language is what it is, we find it convenient to talk that way even though we do not actually intend to imply purposes.

As, I think Dawkins, points out, evolution is a mechanism which leads to things that give the appearance of having been designed. Organic form and function arise from this natural process just as mountains erode into the sea or stars eventually burn themselves out.

“The reason, I submit, is that naturalists tend both to be officially committed to the view that there is no real teleology in nature, and yet in practice find that teleological language is indispensable.”
There’s a more simple explanation, humans have evolved to think in terms of design. That we find teleological language indispensable is no more indicative of a problem in evolution than than using dualistic language to describe the workings of a computer. What’s important is to be able to give an account of evolution in terms of the nature of physics, and on that note it should be quite apparent that there’s no contradiction between the undirected purposeless process of evolution and the function and design in its outcome.

Kel:

It’s quite easy to explain how nature is able to build without any purposes or goals or ends at all. Why do we have some rocks sharp, or other rocks smooth? They’re that way because of forms of erosion – no purpose or goals or ends, just particles interacting with other particles from which structure is altered.

As Dennett says, different functions and goals appear at different levels of analysis, or as he would say, “stances”. Even remaining in the physical stance, and just describing the operations of atoms, for example, indicates various teleological aspects, such as the propensity of fermions to achieve the lowest energy state. The fact that atomic behavior is not completely random, but actually follows various natural laws indicates that atomic behavior is directed towards fulfilling the goals inherent in the natural laws. So, even if you remain at this level of analysis, you still have teleology. If you didn’t, then you couldn’t say that atoms follow natural laws at all.

I think that you are confusing final causes with predetermined purposes or goals that had to be present in advance. That is not the case, and there is no problem with more complex teleology emerging from more basic teleological processes. I would say that human consciousness is a good example of that, for example.

If one follows the evolutionary algorithm, it should be apparent why this is. A mutation that makes an organism harder to distinguish from the background is means that organism is less likely to end up as prey, and thus copies of that mutated gene will spread through generations. Mutations that make the organism even harder to spot will likewise have that same benefit as far as the genetic material. Thus over time, camouflage will emerge without any purpose or goal or ends.

But the purpose of camouflage is to hide the organism from its prey. Whether that was the original intention all along is irrelevant. If you agree that that is the purpose of camouflage, then we are just arguing semantics, because you have agreed that teleology is inherent in nature, and not just an imposition of our minds.

H.H.:

If teleology is both an intrinsic part of nature and imposed by our minds by our mental categories, then you agree with Feser that there are ends in nature that our minds are able to discover. And if that is so, then the only disagreement that remains is exactly how our minds are able to do this, and even more importantly, how they can get it right or wrong, because there are times that we observe things in nature that are not there at all, which is when our pattern-detecting capacity finds a false positive.

Andrew:

Secondly Edward Feser doesn’t offer two arguments, he offers two assertions, at least in the passage quoted by Eric MacDonald. Perhaps elsewhere in his book Feser explains why I should accept these assertions. On the face of it, I find his assertions absurd. Why shouldn’t I be able to figure out the function of an organ without knowing anything about that organ’s evolutionary history? And I don’t see why it follows from evolutionary theory that if you found a biological structure that hadn’t evolved it can’t have a function.

If you start with the initial premise: “X has a function F if and only if X has evolved such that having F conferred a survival advantage”, then it follows that if X had not evolved, then X could not have a function F. That is just the logical implications of the premise, and as such, do not require any argument at all. The idea is that if we can identify functions without any knowledge of evolutionary history, then the premise is false, and should be rejected. You clearly agree that we knew the functions of various organs, such as hands, eyes, and so on, even prior to Darwin, and so the premise should be rejected. I think we are in agreement here.

As for dguller’s opinion that nothing in nature makes sense without invoking directedness towards various ends, I don’t agree. Yes, it makes sense to people to say the antelope has evolved the ability to run fast to escape cheetahs, and that cheetahs have evolved the ability to run faster to catch said antelope. But to take from this that running fast is an end is a mistake, I think. The only end that matters in evolution is to make babies. Everything else is just a means to that end.

Why can’t running fast be an end that furthers the end of making babies? It is like getting a job is an end to further the end of making money to further the end of paying one’s bills, and so on. The directedness of nature is a lot like that, I think, and depending upon your level of analysis, different ends will become more prominent, which is something that Dennett also says in his concept of the three stances: physical, design and intentional. Each of these stances allows us to identify different purposes and ends that we otherwise would have missed. So, I think that we agree that there are ends in nature, and that they exist in a complex interrelated web where one leads to the other.

Would that be fair to say?

One more thing: what version of naturalized teleology do you find most compelling in its ability to explain function in completely non-functional and non-teleological terms?

Steve:

I’m having a really hard time understanding what kind of thing “directedness towards certain outcomes” is actually supposed to be, and how you’re able to detect it. How would you demonstrate that evolution has “directedness towards certain outcomes” rather than simply having a predictable regularity? Why can’t “just what happens” simply happen in a predictably regular way? As far as I can tell, the only thing we can actually observe is a predictable regularity – as per Hume, I suppose – and it sounds to me like the claim that predictable regularity “indicates the presence of a directedness towards certain outcomes, and not others” is just asserting that there is some thing which is responsible for the predictable regularity, and naming that thing “directedness towards certain outcomes”.

Fair comments.

The basic starting point, for me, is that anything does not happen. We do not observe rabbits becoming lions, or roses turning into acorns, for example. There are restrictions to what is possible, and whenever something happens, it does so within a range of specific possible outcomes. What is it that restricts the possible outcomes? There must be something, because we do not observe chaos and randomness all around us. And furthermore, is it more likely that there is something in the nature of things that directs them to specific possible outcomes, or is it just a haphazard accidental event? I think the former is more likely, because if the latter were the case, then we would not see the regularity and predictability that we observe around us at all. We would, in fact, observe rabbits becoming lions, or roses becoming. And even if you argue that there is nothing within entities that directs their behavior, but rather their environment directs them, then you would have to explain this directedness of the environment to move entities towards certain outcomes, and the directedness of entities themselves to be influenced by the environment in such a way. To me, all this strongly supports the idea that the nature of entities directs them towards fulfilling certain possible outcomes, and that is all we need for basic Aristotelian teleology.

What I’m missing is the reason anyone would think that using that name is more justifiable than, say, “the thing which enforces efficient causality”, or any number of other names, even if we were to grant that it’s reasonable to conclude that there could be some identifiable thing which is responsible for predictable regularity. Can you provide a justification for that?

You can call it whatever you want, but the name should refer to the fact of directedness towards certain specific outcomes in nature. That is the phenomenon that is being named. But what you have to realize is that the vast majority of such directedness is unconscious, and that the combination of unconscious directedness can even form conscious directedness in a mind, for example. That is actually an idea consistent with Dennett’s philosophy of mind.

(I should note, the reason I care about the naming convention is that there seems to be a definite tendency to continue from “directedness towards certain outcomes” into basing further reasoning on what those outcomes are assumed to be, which seems illegitimate if there’s no reason to suppose that the “outcomes” have any existence in the first place.)

I share your concerns, because there is a tendency to assume that if there are ends, then there must be a conscious intellect that put those ends there. I don’t find this teleological argument compelling, and so I can happily endorse Aristotelian final causes without worrying about letting God in the back door, which seems to be the concern of a number of individuals here.

Prof Feser,

Since you are here….

On both this blog and your blog,s comment section, I have been persuing a line of questioning that I (and others) find to be a glaring weakness in your claims concerning final causes, purpose, function, and natural law. ( realizing these are related but separate issues, I find a similar problem in each):

How is it that you avoid a sort of naturalistic fallacy in your inferences?
In the quotes we have seen where you infer the “Final Cause” of our sex organs, it rather screams naturalistic fallacy…or at the least, it provokes the question of how you are leaping from your collection of descriptive statements (penis is shaped this way, vagina shaped that way, this happens to each during stimulation etc) to declaring their Final Cause, let alone moving to a normative declaration of how they ought to be used. I was fairly aghast at the
way your reasoning made no such bridge and hung there as arbitrary assertion.

A similar problem occurs every time I see a Thomist speak of, or reason about “ends, purpose, function and especially final cause.
How is a final cause determined for any entity, or biological feature?
The problem seems to be that the Thomist/Aristotelian wants to say both that these are OBJECTIVE (and intrinsic?) qualities in the entity being investigated. And that the Thomist can infer final causes from observing the entity.

But it seems to follow from this that when trying to infer a final cause from your observations, you have to avoid begging the question and assuming the final cause. Hence, you must be STARTING at a set of descriptive statements, and moving from those to your conclusion of a final cause.

What I keep asking in your comments section of the Thomist there ( and of you) is: How EXACTLY do you do this? That is, how do you select from among the many possible descriptive statements concerning entity, which ones constitute the “final cause?”. And how does the logic work to bridge from the possible sets of descriptive statements to Final Cause? That is, in a way that does not betray arbitrariness, question begging, special pleading.

I sure haven’t seen the answer in any of your acolytes replies thus far, nor in anything you’ve written here.

Take some examples, such as a biological feature: the human leg.
From the countless descriptions we can derive from observing legs: what they are made of fundamentally (e.g. physical particles and forces, chemical reactions, muscles, bones, blood,) on up to the dizzying number of descriptions we can give about how humans deploy their legs in action…how do you select any particular description(s) as identical with the final cause of legs, let alone move to what legs “ought” to be used for?

Humans use legs for walking
Humans use legs for jumping
Human use legs for sitting down
Humans use legs for kicking the faces of other people, etc.

In the same say I’d want to know how precisely you move from any descriptive “is” statement to an “ought” statement, I’d like to know how, when inferring findal cause, you move from your descriptive statements to declarations of final cause (or even ends or functions or purposes…)

If somewhere in such statements there could be the final cause, how precisely do you privilege any particular description over the others as the ” final cause” – how is the leap made such that it won’t betray the subjectivity and arbitrariness of your choices?

So far I’ve found the answers from people at your blog site to be utterly inadequate and indicative of just the arbitrariness and subjectivity as seems to be peering from underneaton what I’ve seen you write on these matters.

Thank you.

RH

RH

If you can’t do a really good job of this, then it seems to me you fail to establish any of your assertions about purpose, function, ends, and certainly final cause (and with it Natural Law) as objective.

dguller wrote:

You can start with the heart’s function to pump blood through the circulatory system. Feser would argue that this is an inherent part of nature, and not just an imposition of the human mind. It is something that our minds can pick up by virtue of pattern-detecting capabilities.

In the context of the disagreement going on here it, it is begging the question to assign “function” at the outset to the heart.

We both agree we detect a pattern – heart pumping blood through the body.
Whether it is necessary to view this in some form of objective teleological sense is under dispute.

As is pointed out over and over, the problem is that, as it concerns the heart or any other biological feature, we apprehend many more patterns than the ones you arbitrarily selecting. We observe that hearts not only pump blood, bit they grow in size, shrivel, harden, burst, in.every single case the heart cells ultimately die, and become door for other organisms etc. These are all descriptions of patterns we observe when observing human hearts.

It’s the same question as usual: how do you select from and move from ANY PARTICULAR REGULARITY/PATTERN/DESCRIPTION to your conclusion THIS ONE IS THE FUNCTION.

You can show X happens, and we can agree all sorts of X’s happen.

I have yet to see you, or Feser, or anyone else display these moves without the consequence of revealing the subjectivity involved.

RH

Yeesh. My first time typing this stuff on an iPad.

A sentence in the above post is to read:

in every single case the heart cells die and become FOOD for other organisms.

RH

Oh, and there’s a mess at the end resulting from bad copying and pasting: forgive me.

I had forgotten that Feser is an Aristotelian. “that which does not exist cannot influence that which does exist” is such an ancient Greek remark!

However, it depends on what you mean by “exist”. There is a sense in which, for a reductionist, only material objects exist. The statement that a wasp’s sting has a particular function reduces, ultimately, to some incredibly complex set of relations between atoms or their components. The function exists by virtue of that set of relations. However for our limited minds the function only becomes comprehensible when translated into statements about what the wasp does with its sting.

Just as elliptical planetary orbits (also reducible to relations between atoms) do not imply a cosmic geometer, biological functions do not imply a cosmic purposer.

But it seems to me that this makes the “naming” of whatever it is which ensures reliable and predictable outcomes, whether in terms of “directedness” or in terms of “dispositional properties” – more unjustifiable than before.

Yes, and even less justifiable is the idea that this ability to name has specific ontological implications. It’s reminiscent of Anselm.

I find it very difficult to tell what the practical difference is between saying “particles of type P behave in ways which are described by rule R because they have a directedness toward following rule R (or because they have the dispositional property of following rule R)” and saying “particles of type P behave in ways which are described by rule R and we don’t know why”. What does making the first claim actually get you, in terms of insight into anything whatsoever?

Yes, yes, 1000 times yes.

I think I agree with RH – and the whole concept of Final Causes, whatever Aquinas meant by it, seems imbedded in a medieval notion of a universe (the earth, as they saw the universe then) created in its final form, static and unchanging, with jugglers on street corners and church bells ringing. Final Form requires Final Causes, I suppose. As our understanding of the physical universe has improved, this medieval conception seems quaint. We now know that we live as the product of matter and energy evolving since (at least) the big bang, and destined to continue evolving into the farthest imaginable future. If Aquinas had lived during the late Cambrian, he would have had to think of the proto-crustaceans as the Final Form justified by the Final Cause. Deviant sex among the crawling invertebrates would have been deemed a cardinal sin.

It seems to me that a great deal of the argument circles around the use of the word ‘function’.

If you ask ‘What is the function of the kidneys?’ there is a huge difference between the variants

1) ‘What are kidneys for?’ and

2) ”How do kidneys behave?’

The first variant imports inference of purpose from an observer. Teleology (in my opinion here) is a characteristic of the observation, not the observed item.

The second variant merely asks what data may be observed. The theory of evolution (with all the bells and whistles) is a model of how the behaviour of ancestral forms could have been modified through iterations of selection to display the behaviours we observe today.

While most scientists talk about what something is for this is a poor model of explanation (but an efficient way of communication) which exposes our cognitive biases in the detection of agency and the creation of narratives. I don’t believe most scientists accept teleological explanations as actual mechanisms,.

Anne,

Personally, I’m familiar with the terms you mention, but I don’t see how an awareness of these terms would reveal that Feser is confused. Suppose that the consciousness emerges out of aimless matter — how would that show that our scientific theories are right in ascribing functions/aims to matter? Do our ascriptions of functions just always “happen” to line up with the movements of atoms?

This is where you would appeal to levels of description, no? So, on one level, an event is “the movement of such-and-such from A to B” and on another level the same event is “John’s attempt to catch the football”. The question, however, is which event is more FUNDAMENTAL. If you say that the first description is more fundamental, then what you are essentially saying is that the second description is dispensable. But if the second description is dispensable here, then why would any ascription of function ever be fundamentally true? Aren’t they just paraphrases, so to speak?

Now, you might want to say that BOTH descriptions are equally fundamental; i.e., neither are paraphrases. But this brings up a sort of dualistic interactionism, since it seems to say that there are two different events which correspond — miraculously?

Now, I haven’t read Feser’s arguments at length, so I’m not qualified to say if I’m defending precisely his point, or just something in the neighborhood of his point.

RH:

How EXACTLY do you do this? That is, how do you select from among the many possible descriptive statements concerning entity, which ones constitute the “final cause?”. And how does the logic work to bridge from the possible sets of descriptive statements to Final Cause? That is, in a way that does not betray arbitrariness, question begging, special pleading.

It seems that your dilemma is similar to mine with respect to teleological accounts; namely, where does one stop the causal chains? Every entity has a particular range of possible behavioral outcomes, and those outcomes continue to ripple through space-time. Where do we stop the causal chains, and declare that event to be the end of the original event?

My solution would be to first identify what the possible outcomes are by scientific study and observation. Once we have observed and studied the outcomes, we can attempt to classify them and categorize them into some kind of hierarchy. We can compare them to similar entities, and see what their differentiating features are, which might give us another clue as to what their unique function may be.

For example, looking at the heart, we observe that it pumps blood through the circulatory system. We can compare it to other organs, which do different things. We can examine its pumping in the context of the overall organism, and see its pumping as an essential component to life. We can observe that there is nothing else in the organism that does what it does. At a cellular level, its cells are different from the muscle cells of our arms and legs, for example, because they can auto-excite themselves. We can see that this is an important difference, because in order to pump blood, there must be a rhythmic contraction that does not exhaust the muscle tissue. I think that any reasonable person would conclude from this that the function of the heart is to pump blood through the circulatory system.

All the other functions of the heart within the organism are consequences of this core function. For example, the delivery of nutrients and oxygen to tissues could not happen without pumping, the removal of toxic substances to the liver and kidneys and lungs, and so on.

But that is only from the standpoint of the individual organism. When we look beyond to the wider ecosystem, then we can see other causal consequences of the heart, such as eventual decomposition and consumption by other organisms. Therefore, from that standpoint, another function of the heart is to eventually feed microscopic organisms and continue their cycle of life.

From the standpoint of the galaxy, the heart is useless, and does nothing important at all.

So, there are real functions that are disclosed at different levels of analysis, and we can discover these functions by scientific study. But I agree that there is no single function that is final.

Anne:

Even if you just speak of atoms, it is clear that there is goal-directed activity, unconscious, of course. Electrons surrounding the nucleus seek to occupy the lowest energy states. This does not mean that they have a desire anything like humans do, and follow it, but only that they have an inner propensity or nature such that they behave in predictable ways by virtue of pursuing certain ends.

Steve:

That is, we know that rabbits and lions are made out of atoms, atoms are made up of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles follow certain rules which are, as far as we can tell, never violated (on average). So it would seem that there is no need for, as it were, a directedness of rabbits towards continuing to be rabbits, because the fact that rabbits continue to be rabbits and never turn into lions is comprehensively explained by the fact that they are made up of parts which do not act in ways which would allow such a transformation. As a result, the only level at which it would make sense to consider the “directedness” of things is the subatomic level (which I suppose is what Feser is referring to above when he says, “…what new essentialists and Aristotelians argue is that at some level, and particularly the bottom level of physical causation, there will necessarily be certain dispositional properties.”).

That would be true only if we assumed that there was a single level of explanation, i.e. the physical stance, to use Dennett’s terminology. It would also assume that teleology at the fundamental level of reality cannot generate a different type of teleology at a different level in some kind of emergent phenomena. I don’t think either of those assumptions is necessary true, because even if rabbits only persisted in being rabbits by virtue of the behavior of their atomic components, then it still follows that the rabbits are persisting in being rabbits, and that this is a true description. You also seem to assume that one commits the fallacy of composition if one ascribes teleology to both the parts and the whole, which is not necessarily the case, either.

But it seems to me that this makes the “naming” of whatever it is which ensures reliable and predictable outcomes, whether in terms of “directedness” or in terms of “dispositional properties” – more unjustifiable than before. For one thing, as far as we can tell, in many cases the outcomes of subatomic events are not reliable and predictable, which indicates that at least some outcomes are not constrained – in their particulars – by the “directedness” of the entities involved.

That is only partially correct, I think. There are properties of subatomic particles that are reliable and predictable, such as the conservation of fermions in particle interactions, for example, which always holds. And even the probabilistic behavior that you are likely referring to is not just utter chaos. We know with extreme accuracy what the odds are of certain outcomes, but we do not know when those outcomes will happen, and which particles will perform those outcomes. So, even if it is the nature of subatomic particles to behave in a probabilistic fashion, as many quantum theorists believe, then that can be ascribed to their nature and be part of the directedness of their behavior. The specifics are less important than the general framework in which entities have natures that direct them to behave in some ways and not others, and that this directedness is a part of nature, and not just a psychological quirk of human beings.

More generally, I find it very difficult to tell what the practical difference is between saying “particles of type P behave in ways which are described by rule R because they have a directedness toward following rule R (or because they have the dispositional property of following rule R)” and saying “particles of type P behave in ways which are described by rule R and we don’t know why”. What does making the first claim actually get you, in terms of insight into anything whatsoever?

Well, for one thing, the first statement locates the rationale for their behavior within the particles themselves, and thus provides a focus for scientific investigations. The second does not provide any guidance whatsoever to further our understanding at all.

Another practical difference is the distinction between correlation and causation. The former statement would be more consistent with causation, and the latter more with correlation. I would object to any account of science that made it simply the seeker of correlations and not deeper causes for all that we observe around us.

But ultimately I would agree with you that we do not understand the directionality of entities, and how this is possible. However, that does not mean that we need to deny that it even exists.

Kel,

The trouble is that “thinking in terms of design” and “finding teleological language indispensible” are themselves instances of the very phenomenon you are trying to explain away. To think in terms of design is to be in a state which “points” or is “directed at” something beyond itself, viz. to the notion of design itself. To “find something indispensible” is to have a certain kind of dispositional property, and in the way I described above, dispositional properties also involve a kind of “directedness” or “pointing” to something beyond themselves.

Here’s the basic problem situation. The early modern thinkers wanted to eliminate all such “directedness” — which was the core of the Scholastic idea of final causality — from the material world. Hence they relocated all of it into the mind, as the intentionality and purposes we are familiar with in conscious thought. They were aware, though, that precisely because they redefined matter in such a way that it was devoid of any inherent directedness or teleology, they couldn’t consistently characterize the mind (the site of directedness par excellence) itself as material. This is one reason most of them were dualists. (Not all — there were materialists like Hobbes — but it did not catch on at the time because dualism essentially followed from the new conception of matter, in part for the reason just given.)

Now, if one wants to avoid such dualism, one will have to find a way to assimilate mind to matter. But all such attempts (so I argue in the book) are either implicitly eliminativist, or they implicitly attribute to matter precisely the sorts of inherent teleological properties that were supposed to have been banished from matter. (Algorithms would be an example of the latter — I would say that there is no way to make sense of the idea of algorithms as an inherent feature of nature unless we are willing to attribute to these purportedly algorithmic processes the sort of unconscious directedness that Aristotelians have always attributed to nature.)

The eliminativist alternative, I argue, cannot coherently be made out. So, the teleology-denying naturalist has to either (a) endorse some kind of dualism, (b) implicitly endorse something like Aristotelian teleology, or (c) endorse an incoherent elminativism. (Or, to round the possibilities out, (d) endorse some kind of panpsychism or idealism, if one wants to tie — as Aristotelians do not — all directedness or teleology directly to a mind.) But all of these options effectively involve either the abandonment or self-refutation of naturalism. And thus naturalism fails.

Again, all this is spelled out in the book.

Electrons surrounding the nucleus seek to occupy the lowest energy states.

So if this is the sense that “dispositional property” is meant, what kind of property is not dispositional? I don’t see what it gets you that saying plainly that something has a property or behaves in a certain way doesn’t. Isn’t this just turning empirical induction on its head by positing classes or ranges of properties and behaviors (“stability,” say) and then looking for things that exhibit them, instead of applying names to patterns of property or behavior in observation that appear often enough to warrant a label? It seems to me a leap to claim that the ability to apply a label to a pattern of behavior says something profound about the world.

(Eric, I hope you don’t mind hosting so much back-and-forth between me and dguller; I’m pretty sure we’re staying within the topic of the parent post, but I can cut it out if you think it’s distracting)

dguller,

…even if rabbits only persisted in being rabbits by virtue of the behavior of their atomic components, then it still follows that the rabbits are persisting in being rabbits, and that this is a true description

Well, yes, but I find it very difficult to imagine what it would mean to say that rabbits stay rabbits because of the properties of their fundamental substrate – which completely prevents them from suddenly not being rabbits – and rabbits stay rabbits because of their own rabbity teleology which prevents them from suddenly not being rabbits. The second clause there doesn’t seem to do any work, if you see what I mean. It might be impossible for us to actually grasp the way in which all the subatomic particles in a rabbit work together to make up the small animal we see, and certainly we ourselves are unable to describe the behaviors and observable properties of the rabbit in terms of particle physics (and therefore must move on to a design or intentional stance, as per Dennett) but I don’t see how that fact gives rise to anything “mysterious” about the continuous existence of rabbits qua rabbits which would impel us to hypothesize some additional metaphysical property. Why it is that subatomic particles seem to follow the rules they are observed to follow is, I admit, a mystery to me. But why rabbits should only and ever behave in ways which are consistent with being made up of subatomic particles is quite easily explained by the observation that, in fact, they are!

But ultimately I would agree with you that we do not understand the directionality of entities, and how this is possible. However, that does not mean that we need to deny that it even exists.

Fair enough, but what I don’t understand is why we would want to claim that the directionality of entities does exist. It just doesn’t seem to do any more work than admitting that we don’t know why things go the way they go, all the way down to the Planck length. You point out that the teleological perspective “locates the rationale for their behavior within the particles themselves, and thus provides a focus for scientific investigations” but I think it’s likely that people investigating particle physics have already decided that the particles are probably involved in the physics, so I’m not convinced that we need to introduce teleology to get them to move in that direction. Besides, it may turn out that the rationale for the behavior of particles is somewhere else – in the properties of the vacuum, say, or if it turns out we’re running in a simulation, or the universe is “really” a brane and what we think are particles are actually projections from another brane into ours, or whatever… in any case, I really can’t see how saying “we don’t know” impedes scientific investigation.

Unconscious or not, Aristotle argues that there must be a final cause which brings about the ‘necessary’ conditions – which I think is your argument.

Now I expect that necessary conditions are all that is needed to explain what we observe – which is contrary to your argument.

What tests can we construct to falsify the requirement for final causes? If we cannot construct such a test then final causes are (currently) outside the scope of methodological naturalism – but surely final causes must affect the natural world if they bring about necessary conditions?

I propose (not original!) that philosophical or theological arguments about final causes outside the natural world are absurd.

DiscoveredJoys: “philosophical or theological arguments about final causes outside the natural world are absurd.”

That’s the word I was looking for. Thanks.

“But the purpose of camouflage is to hide the organism from its prey. Whether that was the original intention all along is irrelevant. If you agree that that is the purpose of camouflage, then we are just arguing semantics, because you have agreed that teleology is inherent in nature, and not just an imposition of our minds.”
But I’m not agreeing that teleology is inherent in nature, I’m arguing that it’s emergent and contingent. Now that might be arguing semantics, but it’s an important distinction to make. I see no reason that any design in biology requires any form of mind to come about – it just does by the nature of the process. If this is me getting on board with Feser, then I’m wondering how how God fits into all this – as the process certainly has no purpose, goals, or ends.

This whole debate reminds me of that other group of worthless apologetics- the presuppositionalists. The like to pretend that “laws of logic” are actual things, much in the way that aristotelians like to pretend that “function” is an actual thing, when in reality they’re both just ways of describing stuff doing stuff and how that stuff gets done.

Then they engage in a sort of rhetorical mugging, in which they hope that word games and common english grammar can be used to confuse the issue to the point where they “win.”

Similarly, even though the event of shattering may never in fact be actualized, the disposition (which in some way is actual, since the glass really does have it) cannot intelligibly be individuated without reference to the (as yet non-existent and maybe never existent) event of shattering.

Again, I appreciate your comments.

Does glass (or a match, or what have you) have any properties that aren’t dispositional? In this whole discussion it sounds like it would be productive to be able to separate the dispositional properties from the “plain old” properties, but I can’t see how to do it, and I’m not even convinced it’s an intelligible distinction in the frame you provided. I don’t see what is “extra” in a teleological description that isn’t there in a “plain old” description.

Not Patrick’s Law of Apologetics.

Good point, Another Matt. It is difficult to see how the meager definition of teleology leads to such strange and copious conclusions as Feser seems to do. The distinction is minuscule unless you are willing to go all the way and propose God. I haven’t read the book, and I don’t think I will.

Another Matt,

I know you’re being jocular, but just to be clear, the view does not imply that being either left-handed or eating Sweet n ‘Low is in any way morally problematic. Why would it?

People often think that traditional natural law theory says “It’s wrong to act unnaturally,” full stop, and then have no trouble coming up with ridiculous counterexamples. But that just ignores what the theory actually says. “Natural” has a precise sense in natural law theory. It doesn’t mean “statistically common,” or “occurring in the wild,” or “in accordance with the laws of physics” or any other such thing. It means something like “consistent with the realization of the ends that define the good for a thing given its nature.” And natural law theory does not say that it is necessarily wrong to use one’s faculties in a way that is other than what they are for, given our nature. Rather, it says that it is wrong to use them in a way that is directly contrary to those ends in the sense of positively frustrating them. And even here there are qualifications. The theory is more complicated and subtle than the usual caricatures imply, and cannot be summed up in simplistic slogans like “don’t act against nature.”

Hence (to respond to some common caricatures) the theory does not imply that eyeglasses are unnatural (why would they be? — they correct a defect or enhance a natural capacity, rather than frustrating it), or that eating artificially produced foods is unnatural (why would it be? It doesn’t frustrate us in realizing the ends that follow on our having the natures we do, and can even facilitate our doing so), or that foreplay of various sorts is unnatural (why would it be? — it certainly facilitates sexual intercourse). And so forth.

Natural law moralists have addressed all this stuff in detail. What annoys me is not that people disagree with it. What annoys me is that people don’t bother to acquaint themselves with what defenders of theory actually say. They just focus on simplistic slogans — “Don’t act against nature,” or whatever — and attack those as if they constituted the entirely of the theory!

Yes, of course that was a deliberate attempt to razz you, and I apologize. I know that natural law theorists have filled volumes about this, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that others might “quibble a little” with their assumptions, definitions, and conclusions, even if they’re charitable enough to grant the methodology. I have plenty to say about it but this is probably not the place, since I’ve already filled this thread too much as it is.

Another Matt,

People differ on that question. Some (not all) recent writers on dispositionalism would hold that all properties are dispositional. Others would not, and more traditional Aristotelians certainly would not. This is where the traditional Aristotelian distinction between “actuality” and “potentiality” comes in. (Contemporary analytic philosophers sometimes speak in terms of “categorical” versus “dispositional” properties, which is more or less the same thing.) The distinction was originally introduced in order to explain where thinkers like Parmenides, Zeno, and other defenders of a static view of reality go wrong. Those thinkers say true change is impossible because change would involve going from non-being or nothing to something, and from non-being or nothing, nothing can come. Aristotle’s response is to argue that this ignores the middle ground between absolute non-being or nothingness on the one hand and actuality on the other — that middle ground being potentiality. Hence we might say that a rubber ball is actually solid and in no way granite but it is at least potentially squishy (if you melt it). The presence in it of the potentiality or disposition for squishiness explains how the change from solidity to squishiness can in fact occur. It involves the actualization of potentiality.

Now, potentiality or dispositionality must exist, then, for change and causation to exist. But potentiality by itself is just that — potentiality rather than actuality. And for something to be real is for it in some way to be actual rather than merely potential. Hence, the Aristotelian would say, potentialities must be grounded in actualities. Or, in other words, dispositions must be grounded in categorical properties. And the idea is that this is something we can see must be true as a result of metaphysical analysis, whether or not we can go on to identify specifically what the categorical properties are. Geometrical and spatio-temporal features would be among the examples sometimes given, though.

When it comes to spelling out the nature of the categorical features of a thing in detail, the Aristotelian will proceed by defending the notion of essence or substantial form, which is a whole other topic. Now that’s something people sometimes like to claim was ruled out by modern science, but (the Aristotelian argues) that is not at all the case. That just confuses questions of physics and/or method with questions of metaphysics. Modern physics gets on well enough methodologically without notions like teleology and substantial form. But it simply doesn’t follow that that shows that there are no such things as teleology or substantial form. Indeed, as Bertrand Russell liked to emphasize, the methods of physics really only give us a description in terms of the abstract structure of the world. They do not tell us what it is that fleshes out that structure. But something must do so, otherwise physics would not give us knowledge of an objective, concrete reality but would be a mere abstraction.

Russell’s answer was to look for the concrete and categorical features of the objective world in a modified notion of sense data — a view which is commonly thought to lead to a kind of idealism or panpsychism. Aristotelians would argue instead for a return to the notions of substance, substantial form, the four causes, etc. But however the problem is dealt with, it is a real problem, and one that in the nature of the case cannot be settled by further physics, precisely because it concerns the presuppositions of physics.

This, by the way, is one reason I am so harsh on the New Atheists. Their scientism is something they are extremely confident about, but it is also extremely shallow — they do not know that there are problems with their position that can be addressed rationally, but only by the methods of philosophy rather than science. And they do not know that they do not know this. They shout “Courtier’s Reply” anytime someone wants to tell them. So, folks like me to tend to get testy with them. That’s only natural.

Earlier secularists — like Bertrand Russell, like Wilfrid Sellars, and many others — knew that there were very serious philosophical issues here, and tried seriously to deal with them. I would urge readers here to consider this, and — whether or not they agree with my own views or care for my own tone in The Last Superstition — try, please, to address these issues more seriously than Dawkins, Myers, Coyne, et al. do.

Thanks Gordon. That was a breath of fresh air.

“irritable”‘s comment runs from “It is worth pointing out that Feser…” to “the idea that everything in the world can actually be reduced analytically to its fundamental physical, or material, basis.”

All that follows is a repetition of what I say just before quoting “irritable”, but with “illuminating” rightly corrected to “unilluminating”.

Prof. Feser,

There’s a lot in your post and I won’t get to most of it, but I think I understand the issues enough to think about them for a while, and I appreciate your taking the time to explain. I did want to address this, though:

That just confuses questions of physics and/or method with questions of metaphysics. Modern physics gets on well enough methodologically without notions like teleology and substantial form. But it simply doesn’t follow that that shows that there are no such things as teleology or substantial form. Indeed, as Bertrand Russell liked to emphasize, the methods of physics really only give us a description in terms of the abstract structure of the world. They do not tell us what it is that fleshes out that structure. But something must do so, otherwise physics would not give us knowledge of an objective, concrete reality but would be a mere abstraction.

I don’t think this is quite justified through pure reason. The statement, “something must flesh out the abstract structure of physics” is as much metaphor as explicit proposition — it relies on intuitions about how to interpret “something” (leaving aside the more obvious “fleshing out” metaphor which could be replaced by a regular word). Meanwhile the word “mere,” as it so often does, has to do a whole lot of heavy lifting. I don’t think it’s nonsensical at all to suggest that “abstract structure” is all there is, or to put it another way, that “it’s form all the way down”; this would be the case if it turned out we were living in a grand simulation, for instance. But the “grand simulation” belief is the kind of belief that requires evidence for justification; it’s not something that can be reasoned for or against without at least an accompanying belief regarding the possibility of its falsification and a bit of evidence in its favor. So I don’t think the relationship between science and philosophy is quite the one-way street you suggest it is.

Eric:

Dmitry, why can’t we just speak of electrons as behaving in predictable ways? What does adding “pursue certain ends” add to our understanding of electrons?

Because there is a difference between correlation and causation. If you believe in Hume’s account of causation, which is essentially all you would have left if you rejected final causes, then all you have is correlation. You just have one thing following another, and some things happening with more regularity than others. But this is just correlation. At no point can you ever say that one thing causes another.

Incidentally, this is always why Hume’s account of causation leaves us with a problem of induction. If there is no nature that points and directs beings to behave in specific ways, then at present, there is nothing directing where a being’s behavior will lead in the future, and thus it is always an open question whether the behavior that we have observed an entity perform will continue. However, if you accept something like final causality, then you can be justified in making inductive inferences about future instances. Again, that is because of the directedness of the nature of an entity that points it in particular directions, and not in others.

RH:

As is pointed out over and over, the problem is that, as it concerns the heart or any other biological feature, we apprehend many more patterns than the ones you arbitrarily selecting. We observe that hearts not only pump blood, bit they grow in size, shrivel, harden, burst, in.every single case the heart cells ultimately die, and become door for other organisms etc. These are all descriptions of patterns we observe when observing human hearts.

I suppose that it would be a matter of how one chooses to categorize those behaviors. All organs composed of cells grow and eventually die, and some do shrivel, harden, and burst secondary to disease or malfunction. That is all relevant to the nature and behavior of biological organs composed of cells. And since the heart is such an organ, it follows that it would share these properties, of course.

However, the heart also has a property that no other organ has, and which is actually essential to the ongoing living of the organism that has a heart, such that if its function fails, then the organism can no longer live, and that function is to pump blood through the circulatory system.

So, that is one way to determine what the function of an entity is, i.e. by comparing it to other similar entities, and determining its unique function relative to the others.

This is also depends upon the perspective that one brings to the analysis. For example, if one was looking just at the heart itself, then its function is to pump; if one was looking at the organism as a whole, then its function is to pump blood through the circulatory system; if one was looking at a group of beings, then the heart’s function might partially be to maintain the strength of the group; and if one was looking at the galaxy, then the heart does not seem to have an important function at all.

I know, man. I have an iPad, as well, but I just gave up typing anything long on it, and use my MacBook instead.

Thanks to rick, Discovered Joys and irritable for positive and useful comments. I would like to reply briefly to irritable, and then I have to disappear for some hours. I hope to be back later.

I don’t think it is fair to say that Feser is trolling. I think he genuinely believes in what he says and he feels a tremendous urgency to counter a way of looking at the world that he thinks has pernicious consequences. I also think he has been making serious attempts here to contribute to a real dialogue. So I accept that in his haste he will come across as rather unpleasant and will miss a number of things. I just think that he is wrong, and that there is much in his own view which in fact is very destructive of sober attempts by people who wish to learn how to get on with each other without constantly anathematising and condemning. I think that building a tolerant and nurturing society is more important than fighting over our various conceptions of ultimate truth. Or, to put it personally, the well-being of my daughter and my students and all the others I care about has to come before we can sit down comfortably together and thrash out philosophical problems that we are probably incapable of ever resolving. I am sick of religious and ideologues who feel it their duty to lay down the law for the whole world. I think we need to work from the bottom up. Maybe in doing so we’ll discover something new. Sorry, have to go. I’ve been enjoying this discussion. Thanks to everybody.

GordonWillis:

First, regularity is predictable by definition, so we can dispense with “predictable” and talk about regularity.

Good point.

Regularity is not “directedness”. It’s just regularity. I believe that there is a mistake here which is partly semantic (a matter of association of usage and meaning) and partly in our own regular tendency as social animals to look for intentions or “motives”. But if we rule out words like “directedness” (which suggests both direction and a director) and “disposition” (which confuses us with its suggestion of latent intention), we can manage perfectly well with regularity. Things do what they do because of underlying regularities.

I would respond that correlation is not causation, although causation does involve correlation of a particular type. Correlation would occur when two events happen often in conjunction with one another, such as night following the day, but we do not say that the night causes the day. Causation would involve not only correlation and regularity, but a particular type of regularity in which there is some kind of mechanism connecting the antecedent and consequent events, and I think would involve some directedness from the antecedent towards the consequent events, which an Aristotelian would call a “final cause”.

To say “species survive” does not mean that animals have a final cause, which is “to survive”. All it actually means is, “they’ve been around for a while and they’re still here”, and evolutionary theory gives an account of how they come to be (still) here and how an ant has one shape and a jellyfish another. So “survival” is only an “end” for the purposes of scientific explanation. It isn’t an intrinsic end.

But if you actually look at the biological machinery of living organisms, then you will see that they are all geared towards the preservation of survival. They have a boundary between their interior and the external world, and they guard that boundary to minimize the risk of toxic substances entering the interior and causing damage. They also guard their interiors with an immune system to identify and destroy invaders. They have power plants (i.e. mitochondria) that generate the energy needed to survive. They have waste disposal units (i.e. liver, kidneys, and GI tract) to eliminate unwanted substances. They have a mechanism to allow nutrition to enter their internal milieu, and to transmit those nutrients throughout their organism.

I mean, it is a stretch to say that this complex organism who has a number of subcomponents that clearly have identifiable roles that we can scientifically study is not making an enormous effort to stay alive. After all, it is easier to allow entropy to occur, and just deteriorate and die, and it takes effort and energy to retain the type of internal organization and structure that is essential to life. What is the point of all of this effort if not to stay alive, and why is it so objectionable to say that this is an objective fact, independent of our psychological preferences? Sure, it may be an accident of evolution that such an organizational structure has evolved, but now that it is here, it is quite clear that preservation and sustenance is the purpose.

Glass: electrons and protons behave in such a way that you can get silica, and one thing that can happen with silica is glass, which is interesting but don’t sit on it. To say “glass has a disposition to shatter” is a (perhaps unintentionally) confusing way of saying “glass is brittle” and, while actually saying no more than that, it seems, to our social minds, to be implying something more.

The idea is that the glass’s brittleness is not a reality in the same way that its translucence is. The brittleness is a potential that has not been actualized, whereas its translucence is actualized by virtue of the ability of photons to transmit through the glass. So, a disposition is about potential, and a potential is always a potential for some specific outcome, and this is all the directionality is supposed to refer to, i.e. the limited range of possible outcomes that an entity is disposed to actualize. That is all that is supposed to be meant, I think.

We can talk coherently about the state of things, and how they got into that state from whatever state came before, but it is misleading to describe it by saying that the state of something is directed towards some end. Better to say that everything comes about through regularity and is subject to the same regularities at all times. Glass is brittle because of the regularity of things, not that it has “shattering” as a potential end.

But regularity is supposed to be indicative of an expected pattern. Let us say that we have observed a regularity where A is followed by B, and let us say that we are now confronted with A. We know that A has the potential to lead to B, but this potential has not been actualized yet. We also know that all potential is potential for specific outcomes, but not others, and this involves a direction towards those specific outcomes, in this case towards B. It goes without saying that there does not have to be a director overseeing this process at all, and it is immanent within the nature of A that it has B as an end, when A happens.

When you say that it is all regularity, then you are already helping yourself to teleology. Every pattern points towards its repetition, given the opportunity, and remember that is all that teleology is fundamentally about, i.e. something pointing beyond itself towards something else, whether an eventual end or purpose, or a referent for a symbol or sign. And in the present moment, when we are confronted with A, A points towards B as the next step, which we can call an end or goal or whatever, but the issue is not the terms that we use, but about the underlying phenomenon that the terms are supposed to refer to. And it seems clear to me, and I struggled against this idea at first, believe me, that we cannot deny that there is such a directedness towards something not present that is an inherent part of nature.

“What is possible” means “there are restrictions”. “There are restrictions” means “there are regularities”. “Regularities” means “the nature of things”. “The nature of things” means “that’s just how it is”.

And “just how it is” is that currently existing things point beyond themselves to something else that is not present, and this is the directedness that facilitates goal-directed behavior, and all patterns, in fact.

What about saying that the effect of a certain kind of skin is to camouflage an animal from predators?

Sure, one could say that, but then you still have the fact that a certain kind of skin points beyond itself towards the effect of improving its survival by camouflaging the animal from predators. And that is teleology, according to Feser. After all, that skin has a disposition to protect the animal, which is not always actualized, such as when there are no predators around. It is only when there are predators around that its potential for protection becomes actualized. And Feser’s point is that when the disposition is potential, then it is ultimately teleological in the sense that its potential is for protection.

A trait is selected for = an animal that possesses it has reproduced and passed it on. The effect of the trait is to increase survival.
Therefore, a trait is selected for = the trait does something to increase survival. It is not selected because it helps to increase survival, rather the two are the same thing. More simply, selection = survival. The effect of the trait is selection. The effect of reproduction is selection.

That is right. A trait which increases survival is selected for = an animal that possesses a trait that increases survival increases its reproduction and passed it on. Selection just means the increase of a trait in a population because of its contribution to increased fitness to survive in an environment. The linchpin of this entire account that saves it from being a tautology is that the trait must increase survival in order for the whole show to get going. And how does a trait increase survival? It typically does so by allowing the organism to assume a novel function that its competitors lack, such as increased metabolism, increased speed, increased length of limbs, improved vision, and so on.

Whether teleology is an intrinsic part of nature is what we are discussing. That our minds impose it seems more certain, but this might be an emergent characteristic of our mental evolution as social animals, not an intrinsic property of matter.

There are a number of issues here.

First, just because our minds are inherently involved in the detection of patterns in nature does not mean that they necessarily create them. Otherwise, there would be no way to determine whether our pattern-detecting capacity has resulted in a true positive or a false positive, because it is all just in our heads.

Second, if all talk of biological entities doing things to actualize certain ends is essentially a projection of our psychology, then none of it is actually happening in nature. That means that when we talk about the immune system identifying pathogens and destroying them to preserve the life of the organism, then none of this is really happening. After all, white blood cells do not “identify”, because that implies that they are consciously seeking pathogens, and they do not “preserve the life of the organism”, because that implies some kind of purpose or goal. All we can say is that white blood cells bind to the surface of pathogens through receptor mediation, inject a toxic substance into the pathogen, which results in its destruction. Why is this important and significant to an organism? We cannot say, except that this has improved survival, even though we cannot even say this, because that implies that the end or purpose of all this immune activity is to improve survival, which is a no-no. That is why Feser says that most biology will have to be chucked out the window if this account is correct.

I look forward to your comments, and thanks for the stimulating discussion.

Michael, this is the common sense view. I like it, myself, but others with an idealist mind set are somehow feel threatened by it. They are willing to create a labyrinth through which to perform mental gymnastics (mixed metaphor intentional) rather than accept that we should be guided by constrained language, strait forward logic, and evidence. I bet Aquinas was a great guy at a party with a drink in his hand.

What is the point of all of this effort if not to stay alive, and why is it so objectionable to say that this is an objective fact, independent of our psychological preferences?

Organisms descend from earlier generations of organisms that survived. This is part of the theory of evolution which (I hope) is not disputed. Organisms strive to survive (see Spinoza and ‘conatus’). But the naturalistic argument is that the processes are blind. The moment you ask ‘What is the point of all this effort?’ you are again introducing personal values of purpose and final causes that have not been objectively observed. Nor are they needed to explain what we see around us.

So, a disposition is about potential, and a potential is always a potential for some specific outcome, and this is all the directionality is supposed to refer to, i.e. the limited range of possible outcomes that an entity is disposed to actualize.

As I’ve said earlier using phrases like ‘function for’ and ‘potential for’ is just sneaking in your inference of teleology to your observations. Unless, of course, you can provide some concept of what ‘final causes’ are, and how they work in nature.

Now if you care to argue that a sense of purpose helps people to live well, I would agree. I just don’t think purpose exists outside the stories we tell ourselves.

DJ:

Organisms descend from earlier generations of organisms that survived. This is part of the theory of evolution which (I hope) is not disputed. Organisms strive to survive (see Spinoza and ‘conatus’). But the naturalistic argument is that the processes are blind. The moment you ask ‘What is the point of all this effort?’ you are again introducing personal values of purpose and final causes that have not been objectively observed. Nor are they needed to explain what we see around us.

I think that we need to clarify what we mean by “blind process”. There is a difference between a process that operates in order to fulfill local ends, but is blind to the long-term consequences of fulfilling those ends, and a process that is blind even to local ends. For example, you agree that organisms behave in order to survive, which I think would count as a local end. Certainly, this local end, combined with limited resources and subsequent competition, plus differential changes in heritable traits that each contribute or inhibit the organism’s capacity to survive, will ultimately result in the complex organisms that we see all around us today, even if that complexity and richness was not part of the original end of the evolutionary process. So, I would agree with you that evolution is blind in the sense that it has no long-term ends, but it is certainly operating on a local level upon various immediate ends and unconsciously exploiting them to improve survival, amongst other possible ends.

As I’ve said earlier using phrases like ‘function for’ and ‘potential for’ is just sneaking in your inference of teleology to your observations. Unless, of course, you can provide some concept of what ‘final causes’ are, and how they work in nature.

The final cause is just that which an entity is directed towards as an end, and they work by being part of the nature of natural entities. They are, I think, an essential part of the framework from which understanding is even possible, because to deny such final causes means that it is possible for a rabbit to develop into a lion, and for a bowling ball to strike a pane of glass, and it not shatter, and so on. These are ridiculous and impossible outcomes, because they violate the nature of rabbits and glass, which is essentially about delimiting the possible outcomes that these entities can be directed towards completing or fulfilling. This is the way that science is always done, and it does not mean that there is a divine overseer that is supplying all the purpose in nature. That is a separate issue altogether.

Eric:

I don’t see the problem with the problem of induction. Of course, it’s always a question whether a causes b. That’s why science is needed, to sort out what “really” causes b (and science could and has been wrong). And sometimes the answer is quite surprising. But so long as we have conjunction constant enough between two events, then we have (at least a conditional) confirmation that one causes the other. We don’t need to talk about “unconscious” propensities, nor do we need to think of nature as a whole as having purposes or inclinations, however unconscious. This just seems to me a huge metaphysical superstructure without anything to do, and held to be there because we think about things in “this for the purpose of that” sorts of ways.

First, induction is a huge problem if you buy into Hume’s empirical framework, and it completely undermines the possibility of empirical knowledge at all. This was such a problem that it led to Kant’s crisis, and led him to propose his transcendental idealism as a possible solution. So, it is not that Hume’s framework makes scientific inferences difficult, but rather impossible, because science is supposed to discover the laws of nature, which are supposed to be woven into the very fabric of reality, and operative beneath the surface of our observations, guiding them along predictable pathways that we can exploit for our practical well-being. If you deny the existence of anything non-empirical, then you have denied the existence of laws of nature, because we never experience them, but only isolated events in our experience.

Second, you rob yourself of any way to differentiate between mere correlation and actual causation. And correlation is not good enough for physics, for example, which happens to include iron-clad rules that do not admit of any exception, such as conservation of mass and energy. This is not just a statistical probability that has a high likelihood of being correct, but a necessary limit upon what is possible in the real world, and it was not just derived from multiple experiments, but also from careful reasoning from first principles, I believe.

Third, if your fear of theism has the result that you deny any possible directedness in the natural world, then I think that is a far too high price to pay. It is clear that the law-like regularity of the natural world is indicative of the fact that natural entities operate according to specific possible outcomes, and whatever you want to call this phenomenon, it is one that permeates the natural world. Whether we are always correct in our discovery of these directed processes is not the issue, because we can always be wrong about such things. However, that does not change the fact that events in nature point beyond themselves towards the fulfillment of certain outcomes, even when those outcomes are not present at all, and remain only potentialities.

I think that a lot of our disagreement is not about the underlying phenomenon in question, which is the rule-like behavior of beings, but about how to talk about it. I can appreciate your worry that including words that have the possible implication of a divine intellect guiding the processes requires that are very cautious, but I worry that you have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in this case by denying any directionality at all in nature. The fact that when two billiard balls strike, then only one possible outcome can result, even before it has happened, is true whether consciousness is involved in any step. The collision heads in a particular direction, and that direction is not present during the collision, but emerges afterwards in a rule-governed way. And it is something about the billiard balls and the environment in which they interact that is the source of this directedness, not God or consciousness. Aristotle would call it their natures, but you can call it whatever you want, as long as you recognize that there is something about beings that directs them to behave in particular ways, and not others, and that this results in regular and predictable law-like behavior that we can discover through scientific inquiry.

And even St. Augustine – at least in his youth – knew that one does not live by abstractions and theory alone as he reportedly said, “Make me chaste Lord – but not yet”.

But, in passing and relative to your mixed metaphor, I think it is obvious that there are a great many things or ideas that can be “counter-intuitive” but still be true and have some substantial utility – quantum mechanics probably being a paradigmatic example.

Michael:

Think of natural selection as a sieve and organisms as soil particles. If you shake the sieve, some particles will pass through and some will be retained as determined by the particles’ sizes and shapes. No one would say that the function of the soil particles’ sizes and shapes is to pass through a sieve – would they? They are what they are whether they are sieved or not. Or in other words, evolution happens.

Couldn’t one say that the nature of the sieve is such that its function is to only allow certain particles to pass through it? In other words, that even without any soil particles being dropped through the sieve, that it contained the potential to sort through soil particles, whereas it lacked the potential to turn particles into bunny rabbits. And if so, then is it reasonable to say that the sieve points towards the end of particle sorting, even when it is not actually sorting particles at all? That would be an inherent teleological aspect of the sieve, then. And the sieve would not be a sieve if it did not have this function of particle sorting.

Any thoughts?

I think that a lot of our disagreement is not about the underlying phenomenon in question, which is the rule-like behavior of beings, but about how to talk about it.

I think I see where we agree and disagree. In the last couple of posts you’ve been arguing for a much more constrained and conservative version of teleology than even the “brittle glass” example. I don’t think this more conservative “small t teleology” is all that controversial. It can be reframed in a number of ways, but I think it distills to an account of observation and reasoning as it occurs in our temporal situation. It’s just a way for us to model our observations so as to be able to say “if x occurs at some point in the future then it will have been caused by y.” I don’t think many people would have a problem with this version of teleology, which does not yet admit concepts like function, purpose, and so forth, and I expect that a lot of people would not even use the word teleology to describe this.

Where I think things start to go wrong is when language like “in order to” and that phrase’s many cousins start to creep in. Imagine one of the usual “conservation of momentum” experiments, like two blocks with no elasticity sliding toward each other on a frictionless surface. There are a few ways to characterize this event, and each partakes of a kind of teleology:
“The blocks stopped, demonstrating that momentum is conserved.”
“The blocks stopped, due to the conservation of momentum.”
“The blocks stopped, in order to conserve momentum.”
According to your frame, the first is the most empirical and the latter the most teleological. The first supposes we have a law that has been induced from previous observation, and that this instance of observation bears it out. We can even use the posited law to deduce other things, but our belief in them will only be confirmed by evidence.
The second characterization speaks of a law that is “real” insofar as it influences the outcome of the experiment. It might be the same kind of invocation of a physical law that one might use to explain why an air conditioner fell from 10 stories and smashed a jack-o-lantern (“gravity caused it to fall”). It’s slightly more teleological than the first because the law is invoked to explain the relevant data as an instance of the application of the law… “conservation of momentum” is a conservative “final cause” of the observed event.
So far so good, I think, but the third is quite a bit fishier. It ascribes more than the conservative “directedness” to the blocks than the second one does. Far more than saying that the law was the cause of the behavior of the blocks, it says that the blocks were somehow “in on it” and I think it even implies that if the blocks were the same mass and going the same speed and were constrained to move in one dimension but yet they hadn’t stopped after the collision it would be coherent to say “they didn’t stop, in order not to conserve momentum, this time.” Under the first and second characterizations we’d just have to alter our conception or the contents or the scope of the law if the phenomenon were reproducible, but under the latter, because of the phrase “in order to” we’re at a loss of where to go next if something behaves not according to what we think its nature is. There are many other problems beside, but I’ve already written enough to give you a feel for where the rest would go.

I think it’s this latter “capital T Teleology” that people here are uncomfortable with. I think it’s qualitatively different from the “small t” versions. I’m not sure yet which one concepts like “function” fall under, but given the appropriate analysis of observational levels I don’t think “function” would contradict the more conservative versions.

Out of courtesy for the inboxes of Eric and the other threadgoers I think we should end this fairly soon, but it’s been probably the most fun conversation I’ve ever had in blog comments. Eric and Prof. Feser, you should insult each other far more often. =o)

Another Matt:

I think I see where we agree and disagree. In the last couple of posts you’ve been arguing for a much more constrained and conservative version of teleology than even the “brittle glass” example. I don’t think this more conservative “small t teleology” is all that controversial. It can be reframed in a number of ways, but I think it distills to an account of observation and reasoning as it occurs in our temporal situation. It’s just a way for us to model our observations so as to be able to say “if x occurs at some point in the future then it will have been caused by y.” I don’t think many people would have a problem with this version of teleology, which does not yet admit concepts like function, purpose, and so forth, and I expect that a lot of people would not even use the word teleology to describe this.

Like I said, this is the basic phenomenon that Feser is talking about when he is talking about teleology. If you can agree with it, then we are just arguing semantics. You don’t even have to call it “teleology” at all. But the bottom line is that “function”, “goal”, “purpose” and so on, all are different manifestations of this same phenomenon, some in unconscious material entities, and others in conscious beings. Regardless, I think that they all share the fact that in the natural world, all entities seem to point beyond themselves towards the direction of actualizing specific possibilities, and they all are more complicated and sophisticated manifestations of this core reality.

I think it’s this latter “capital T Teleology” that people here are uncomfortable with. I think it’s qualitatively different from the “small t” versions. I’m not sure yet which one concepts like “function” fall under, but given the appropriate analysis of observational levels I don’t think “function” would contradict the more conservative versions.

I think that what people object to is the idea that this directedness necessarily involves either a supervising mind to guide the process in that particular direction, or a mind within the physical entity that chooses a particular direction. Once you add the proviso that neither of these is necessarily applicable, then I have no problem using “goal” or “purpose” or the rest, because I know that even though they seem to conjure in my mind implications about a role for consciousness in the process, I can stop it by reminding myself of the inherent unconsciousness of the process in question. It would be like banning the word “natural selection”, because it involves the implication that nature has a mind that is selecting traits. Sure, it does carry that possible misinterpretation, but once you have clarified your understanding of what “natural selection” means, then you can still use it, despite this possibility of error.

Out of courtesy for the inboxes of Eric and the other threadgoers I think we should end this fairly soon, but it’s been probably the most fun conversation I’ve ever had in blog comments. Eric and Prof. Feser, you should insult each other far more often.

Thanks for the stimulating conversation. Take care.

DJ:

Evolution is a process that works at population level (through lots of individual organisms) so you have to be very careful how you speak of local ‘ends’.

That is a good point.

Perhaps a better way to think about it is along the lines of an emergent property. At the local level, organisms are just struggling to survive for limited resources. When one organism develops an enhanced capability that increases its survival, whether due to a change in the organism due to random mutation, or due to a change in the environment, then that organism has increased chances of better reproductive success, and over time, will dominate the population.

In some ways, it is like the Invisible Hand of the Market. Each individual within the market is selfishly seeking to optimize their own ends, but when a group of individuals interacts in such a way, then there is an optimization of prices and costs that automatically happens, even though it is not the intent of each individual to do so. That would be a good example of what I mean by local ends unintentionally resulting in distant ends. Another example would be the mind emerging from the individual actions of neurons in the brain. No neuron has programming to make a mind, but by doing what it does in a particular organizational structure seems to result in the generation of a mind.

So, natural selection operates when one takes the population perspective and observes a population over time, but if one zooms into the individual level, then there is a struggle for survival for limited resources, and where even the slightest survival advantage due to improved functional capacity in some way can improve reproductive success.

My only point is that just because the more distant ends (e.g. natural selection, invisible hand of the market, the mind) are not present at the local level (e.g. organisms struggling for survival, selfish individuals, neurons) does not make the local ends unreal. In fact, their reality is what generates the emergent process itself. Without animals struggling for survival, there would be no natural selection. Without selfish individuals trying to maximize profits, there would be no equilibrium in market prices. Without individual neurons maintaining their cellular membranes and generating action potentials, there would be no mind.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for catching me up – given my PhD in evolutionary biology – I would have never known that. Too bad you missed the whole point.

“I agree with you that much higher-order teleology in nature is emergent and contingent, but it emerges from the activity of lower-order entities that themselves have a more basic form of teleology.”
It’s not one is a higher order and one’s a lower order, you’re using teleology in two very different ways. When we’re talking about teleology in biology, it’s talking about function and purpose – a wing is for flying, a heart is for pumping blood, etc. It’s a very different phenomenon to glass in the ocean, where the glass will be smoothed out by the way it interacts with the particles of the sea, or a mountain eroding by way of glacier. There’s no purpose or goal or ends.

“Even atoms point beyond themselves towards a direction to actualize a specific possibility. Even before an electron has jumped to a higher quantum level due to the acquisition of energy, it points beyond itself towards such a specific possibility.”
Entropy is a teleological process? I’m not sure what you could possibly mean by such a statement.

“That is the sense of teleology that we are discussing. And you are right that it does not require a mind in most cases, which means that God is incidental to this discussion. There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
There are much better reasons to throw God out than the teleological argument, but haven’t we just agreed that teleology has been naturalised without needing a mind? As Feser said above: “But “assigning a normative value” is itself an instance of teleology or goal-directedness. In particular, it is an instance of the sort of teleology that essentially characterizes creatures with minds, and as we have seen, the human mind is the example par excellence of an irreducibly teleological phenomenon.” You might disagree that I’ve eliminated teleology completely, but you’ve agreed that evolution is reducible away from goals and purpose and ends.

I think this perspective (material monism) is pretty widely accepted among thinkers today influenced by the enlightenment. To revert to Aquinas seems quaint, but irrelevant. Too much water under the bridge.

“The appearance of teleology in the natural world is like the appearance of design, it is an artefact of observation by our conscious minds.
Of course I may be wrong – but in the natural world I would want to see testable natural mechanisms for the production of objective teleology before I could be subjectively convinced.”

DiscoveredJoys is right on the money. There is an appearance of teleology like an appearance of design. And describing it in even the most minimal sense doesn’t ring true to me. The problem with looking at nature teleologically is that it doesn’t fit with the word as we understanding it in the post-enlightenment era. We expect an hypothesis to fit with what we already know and be verifiable in some way. If things are somehow end-directed, how would we demonstrate this? Hard to say, and if we can’t is it even a meaningful idea? We can look at the concept of niche and notice that marsupials evolving independently in Australia occupy similar niches to placental mammals elseware. Does this imply that organisms are guided by specific kinds of habitats to evolve specific kinds of bodies? Well, yes, but as a test of teleology this is not useful because it only says similar patterns are emergent across instances of evolution given similarities in environments. Likewise, we know that certain organs like the eye have evolved many times independently. Does this mean that the eye is a popular evolutionary solution that will, under a variety of conditions, occur? Yes, of course. These cases direct our attention toward the “ends” of evolutionary change, (note that blind moles and cave fishes deny the eye is a true end) yet we still know natural selection is a blind process that does not look ahead. The eye is a solution to a problem of survival that will naturally be stumbled upon as a stochastically probable one. Niches are like pits or valleys in the ecological landscape that accidentally attract organisms that wander blindly nearby.

I think scientific skepticism and caution provides the tools to detect and circumvent the appearances and illusion of design and of teleology that so fascinated Aquinas. If these scientific values are ignored, we are bound to wallow in the errors of past ages.

Eric:

But surely that’s just silly. After all, Hume spoke about constant conjunction and cause. He never deinied that empirical knowledge was possible. It just wasn’t deductive and it was never 100% sure. But most modern scientists in practice accept Hume’s analysis of causation (in general) since they do believe it is necessary to verify casual theories by seeing if the regular conjunctions are there.

Recall Hume’s project. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett, 1993), he argued that if we cannot trace our ideas to any sense impressions, or empirical experiences, then those ideas do not represent anything real, and are simply phantasms of our minds. That is his fundamental premise of empiricism. Based upon this foundation, he argues that “power, force, energy, or necessary connexion” (p. 40) do not exist in reality, and are simply projections of our minds: “Consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion” (p. 41), and thus, we cannot “point out that circumstance in the cause, which gives it a connexion with its effect” (p. 51). (Incidentally, try to do physics without power, force or energy.)

Again, this is rooted in his idea that all we experience are individual empirical events, one after the other, and each individual event lacks what Feser would call “teleology”, i.e. the pointing beyond itself towards the direction of a specific possible outcome. Without this phenomenon, he argues that “Solidity, extension, motion; these qualities are all complete in themselves, and never point out any other event which may result from them” (p. 42). And this is why there is a problem of induction that is more radical than what you suppose, if you take Hume’s system seriously. This is because when we are confronted by X that has always in the past been followed by Y, then at the moment that X appears, there is literally nothing that points in the direction of Y happening, and X is “complete in [itself]”, because “[a]ll events seem entirely loose and separate” (p. 49). X stands facing into a void with nothing that points in any particular direction, and thus we can never say that Y will follow in reality, and are forced to just wait and see. Sure, we can impose our psychological projections upon X and imagine Y will happen, but there is nothing about X that causes Y to happen in reality. As he writes: “he now feels these events to be connected in his imagination” (p. 50).

So, you are absolutely correct that induction per se is not problematic for human knowledge, and it is simply due to our temporal and cognitive limitations, and thus means that we will always fall short of certain knowledge when we are confronted by the future. However, it does not follow from this that there is nothing deeper going on that is causing the various regularities that we experience in nature. That is Hume’s position, and it is a radical one that would nullify all science, because he says that, because we never directly experience the underlying laws of nature, but only their surface manifestations, then there are no laws of nature in reality, but only in our imagination. Try to tell any scientist that the laws of nature that they discover are imaginary fantasies, and see how seriously they will take you. And incidentally, this is one of Feser’s points about Hume. People always pay lip service to him, but rarely understand the radical nature of his project, and just how much it undermines.

As or the other things you say in your comment they seem largely irrelevant to me. Yes, if a particular arugment for the way things are in the world ropes in a god or two, then that is a good reason to go on looking, because there’s no evidence for gods in the universe.

Would you reject reason altogether, because some people would argue that the fact that we can reason at all implies an ultimate source of the regularity in nature that is the root of reason’s efficacy? Of course not. I mean, some concepts are just useful, independent of theology, and just because theology tries to use them for its own purposes is no reason to reject those concepts. Remember, it is not necessary that teleology leads to God, but only possible. Would you really reject an idea, because it might lead to God?

A potentiality to do something is not, so far as I can tell, a teleological function.

Again, you can call this phenomenon whatever you want, but I think that it is difficult to do away with the idea that all things point beyond themselves towards the direction of certain possible outcomes. All potentiality is the potential to do something, and this potentiality points towards the possibility of actualizing it, and thus points beyond what is happening at the moment. This directedness is all Feser is talking about. Honestly, you are getting all hung up with words and connotations. It would be like objecting to using the word “dog” to refer to dogs, because it can also be used to refer to unfaithful men, and you just cannot abide by the possibility that this could be the case.

And if you are arguing that this is just how our minds impose order on the world, then you are agreeing with Hume’s radical conception of the world, and all the paradoxical problems that it entails. So, there are no laws of nature, except in the imagination of scientists. That’s surely a solid foundation for science.

Rick:

I think this perspective (material monism) is pretty widely accepted among thinkers today influenced by the enlightenment. To revert to Aquinas seems quaint, but irrelevant. Too much water under the bridge.

First, just because a position is widely accepted does not make it true.

Second, one does not have to accept the totality of Thomism to accept that Aquinas may have had important insights into certain matters. You can read the article by the neurophysiologist, Walter J. Freeman, about how one can use aspects of Aquinas’ philosophy of mind in a fruitful way to better understand intention in the human mind: http://www.mindmatter.de/resources/pdf/freemanwww.pdf

And you will note that Freeman can use the things that Aquinas seems to have gotten right without being sucked into becoming a devout Catholic. It is possible to keep the baby while discarding the bathwater, after all.

Don’t worry. I’m not in any danger of becoming a Catholic, devout or otherwise.

Another Matt:

I think this is why I find the word “teleology” such a maddeningly poor word to use to describe “potentiality” since we already have words like “potential” and “property” that don’t imply “goal orientation,” but casting them in goal-oriented terms allows you to sneak in all kinds of other nasty things.

“Potential” does imply directedness, because every potential is a potential to become something in particular, and as such every actual being that has potentiality necessarily points beyond itself towards specific possible outcomes, which is all teleology is supposed to be. That is all we are talking about here, and I really don’t think that it is that controversial or nonsensical. And it goes without saying that conscious minds have nothing to do with it in the vast majority of cases, as it seems to be an inbuilt part of the natural world that our minds can discover. Otherwise, every scientific law is just a fantasy in our imagination, which does not represent anything in reality, which is just an incoherent flux of independent events that have no thread tying them together.

The way dguller has been using “teleology,” I think it almost presupposes indeterminacy, because it’s just describing the range of potential future states something could be in that it isn’t in now, and that has a flavor of not being able to know which of those states it will occupy (otherwise you could just describe its state as “statically” occupying some kind of deterministic line and be done with it). Or maybe it’s irrelevant; I haven’t thought about it too deeply.

That is interesting.

I think that it depends upon your perspective. If one was able to observe space-time from the “outside” – whatever that means – then there would be no potential at all, because all you observe is actual events. However, from our subjective perspective as agents operating within space-time, everything is a combination of potential and actuality, and potentiality is always about the future, because what has happened is actual and not potential at all. What might have happened is in our minds, though. So, I think that what I would favor is ontological determinism, even though some interpretations of quantum mechanics would disagree, but epistemological indeterminism by virtue of our position within space-time as agents facing an unknown future and being unable to determine many key factors that would allow us to accurate predict the future due to various human limitations.

Any thoughts?

So, I see nothing wrong with criticizing a definition if its own meaning leads to absurd conclusions, independent of other possible definitions, which may have the benefit of avoiding such absurdities.

That’s fine. Just as a reminder, here’s what you originally wrote:

If you start with the initial premise: “X has a function F if and only if X has evolved such that having F conferred a survival advantage”, then it follows that if X had not evolved, then X could not have a function F. That is just the logical implications of the premise, and as such, do not require any argument at all. The idea is that if we can identify functions without any knowledge of evolutionary history, then the premise is false, and should be rejected. [my emphasis]

Can you explain how you are not introducing and imposing your own definition there?

But it does provide an explanation, but perhaps not the kind of explanation that you would prefer. Aristotle would have said that any explanation must include final causes, or the ends for which an entity is directed towards. So, it depends upon what you mean by “explanation” here.

Well, obviously, but come on. If I ask you, “Why do hearts exist, and why do they take the forms they do?” do you really think you have provided any kind of answer by saying “the heart’s function is to pump blood through the circulatory system.”? The fact that a heart pumps blood through the circulatory system is obvious: it’s what the heart observably does, and as far as I can tell saying that doing pumping blood is its “function” gives me exactly zero information about why it exists at all.

That was a noble effort, except for the inclusion of “dedicated to ensuring that”, which implies an end or goal that the heart’s behavior is supposed to fulfill.

You’re right, that does sound teleological. Well, no one said that it was easy to avoid all teleological-sounding language; the point is to demonstrate that language that sounds teleological can be reduced to meaningful descriptions of efficient causes. To that end, one can replace “animals which had muscles which were dedicated to ensuring that blood was reliably distributed throughout their bodies” with “animals which had muscles which rhythmically contracted in a way which caused their blood to continuously circulate evenly throughout their bodies” and, presto, you can’t make the mistake of thinking it’s teleological anymore. Unless, I suppose, you’re really determined.

The bottom line is that for a trait to increase survival, then that trait must do something to increase survival, and that would have to be a novel function that gives it that advantage, such as being able to metabolize nutrients in the environment that other organisms cannot, for example.

Look what you’re doing: you’re injecting that word “function” in there, as if it’s necessary. But there’s no loss of information if you leave it out entirely. See?

The bottom line is that for a trait to increase survival, then that trait must do something to increase survival, such as being able to metabolize nutrients in the environment that other organisms cannot, for example.

All you need to do is describe what it does, and how that increases survival, and you’re done.

I would say that what X is for can only be determined by comparing it to similar entities in the same general category, and figuring out what X does differently and uniquely, and that would be what X is for.

I can see how that could be a useful definition for some purposes, but it looks like you’ve accidentally left out the teleology. What you seem to have is a definition that lets you determine the “function” of X purely from observations of what X and things similar to X actually do, without any reference to “directedness” or anything like that. It’s a purely physical definition, with no metaphysical speculation. Perhaps teleology isn’t as critical as you had supposed?

dguller,

While I was reading your objection to Hume, I got the feeling that turning to “teleology” for an account of causality and induction fails to actually avoid the point Hume makes. For example, you say,

X stands facing into a void with nothing that points in any particular direction, and thus we can never say that Y will follow in reality, and are forced to just wait and see. Sure, we can impose our psychological projections upon X and imagine Y will happen, but there is nothing about X that causes Y to happen in reality. As he writes: “he now feels these events to be connected in his imagination” (p. 50).

And you would say, I imagine, that when you claim that X is “directed toward” Y, you are not imposing your psychological projections upon X. But from where I stand, that is quite an apt description of what you seem to be doing. After all, you don’t have any more access to the actual fact of the matter about things which haven’t happened yet than I have, and you don’t have any metasenses that can detect the metaphysics and ensure that when you conclude that X is directed toward Y you are correct. In fact, you are stuck – like the rest of us – with the observations you can make of the regular correlations between events, which we all call – after we’ve found a convincing pattern – causation. I don’t see how your possession of a particular metaphysical hypothesis relieves you of the problem that your hypothesis may be wrong.

If it was a legitimate move to declare by fiat that we can so detect “final causes” or “directedness” or whatever, it couldn’t fail to be a legitimate move to declare that we can detect efficient causes as well, which would nicely undercut the rationale for final causes. We could just say, “Look, X causes Y because it has causiness which makes it cause Y.” I suppose that you’ll want to say that causiness is really teleological, not efficient, because it “points beyond X to the causing of Y”… but at that point I think it’s pretty obvious that you would be describing it in the way you preferred, not picking out some kind of “real” metaphysical property.

That is Hume’s position, and it is a radical one that would nullify all science, because he says that, because we never directly experience the underlying laws of nature, but only their surface manifestations, then there are no laws of nature in reality, but only in our imagination. Try to tell any scientist that the laws of nature that they discover are imaginary fantasies, and see how seriously they will take you.

That’s rather unfair. Try to tell any scientist that the laws of nature they discover are absolute certainties which work by directing entities to fulfill their final ends and see how seriously they take you. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Hume’s point is epistemological, not metaphysical; what he’s pointing out is that it’s a mistake to confuse the “laws of nature” which we formulate from observation with the actual Laws of Nature about which we do not have the wherewithal to form any conclusions. And while some scientists may make that mistake, I’m pretty sure that many if not most of them are comfortable with the distinction.

So, there are no laws of nature, except in the imagination of scientists. That’s surely a solid foundation for science.

Well, it’s worked so far. There’s a bit of a, ahem, correlation between the thought of Hume and the birth of modern science, while the correlation between Aristotle and modern science is a little weaker.

Steve:

After all, you don’t have any more access to the actual fact of the matter about things which haven’t happened yet than I have, and you don’t have any metasenses that can detect the metaphysics and ensure that when you conclude that X is directed toward Y you are correct. In fact, you are stuck – like the rest of us – with the observations you can make of the regular correlations between events, which we all call – after we’ve found a convincing pattern – causation. I don’t see how your possession of a particular metaphysical hypothesis relieves you of the problem that your hypothesis may be wrong.

You are absolutely correct that I may be wrong about whether X causes Y. However, it does not follow that the general framework is incorrect. That would be like saying that if we are wrong about saying that X causes Y, then causation itself is incorrect. The big difference is that Hume says that you are always wrong when you infer causal relationships, because they are always in your imagination, and I am saying that you are occasionally wrong, but could possibly be correct!

And metaphysics is ultimately about this general framework within which we can understand anything at all. My contention is that abandoning teleology, in the sense that we have been discussing, makes understanding itself impossible.

If it was a legitimate move to declare by fiat that we can so detect “final causes” or “directedness” or whatever, it couldn’t fail to be a legitimate move to declare that we can detect efficient causes as well, which would nicely undercut the rationale for final causes. We could just say, “Look, X causes Y because it has causiness which makes it cause Y.” I suppose that you’ll want to say that causiness is really teleological, not efficient, because it “points beyond X to the causing of Y”… but at that point I think it’s pretty obvious that you would be describing it in the way you preferred, not picking out some kind of “real” metaphysical property.

It is not an either/or, I believe. Efficient causality necessarily involves final causality, because efficient causes simply actualize the potential within a substance, and that is only possible, because that potential pointed beyond itself, prior to actualization, towards a possible outcome, and that is the final cause. In other words, you cannot have efficient causality without final causality, and vice versa.

That’s rather unfair. Try to tell any scientist that the laws of nature they discover are absolute certainties which work by directing entities to fulfill their final ends and see how seriously they take you.

Laws of nature do not have to be absolute certainties. In fact, history shows that our understanding of natural laws is fallible and often in need of revision. However, this does not undermine the fact that scientists seek out natural laws, and not just what their imaginations project onto a flux. To argue otherwise would be like saying that if I am occasionally wrong about what I perceive, such as if I am hallucinating, then it is impossible to perceive anything independent of myself, which is fallacious. There is an independent world that we try to understand, even if we fail to on occasion, and there are natural laws that regulate that world, even if we are occasionally wrong about them.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure Hume’s point is epistemological, not metaphysical; what he’s pointing out is that it’s a mistake to confuse the “laws of nature” which we formulate from observation with the actual Laws of Nature about which we do not have the wherewithal to form any conclusions. And while some scientists may make that mistake, I’m pretty sure that many if not most of them are comfortable with the distinction.

He is making a metaphysical statement about what exists in the universe. He claims that X is real if and only if X is traced to a sensory experience, and that is a metaphysical claim, because this cannot be confirmed by our senses, much like the falsification criteria cannot be falsified. As such, it is metaphysical, because it is beyond empirical verification.

He did not have to go to such elaborate metaphysical lengths to just remind people that scientists are occasionally wrong in their conclusions about how nature works. Instead, he argued that nature does not work at all, but only does so in our imaginations.

Well, it’s worked so far. There’s a bit of a, ahem, correlation between the thought of Hume and the birth of modern science, while the correlation between Aristotle and modern science is a little weaker.

Says who? Modern science can probably be traced to the late medieval period, and fully came into fruition around the time of Newton (1642-1727). The Royal Society was formed in 1660, in fact. Hume lived from 1711-1776. In other words, science was already flourishing in multiple organizations and conducting numerous seminal experiments to uncover the laws of nature using the scientific method even before Hume was born. He certainly was well regarded in his time as a historian. Perhaps you can dig up exactly how Hume influenced modern science?

RH,

Sorry for the delay in replying — was gone much of yesterday and today.

We need to distinguish two questions: first, what is good for a thing, human beings included; and second, why should a human being care to do what is good for him. The so-called “naturalistic fallacy” objection would be relevant to both.

My earlier remarks were primarily concerned with the first question. And here I don’t see that you have really raised any objection at all, at least given the truth of an Aristotelian metaphysics. (And the points I as making above all presuppose Aristotelian metaphysics — the point was to explain how ethics proceeds given such a metaphysics, not to defend the metaphysics itself, something I have of course done elsewhere.)

In particular, IF it is true as a matter of objective, mind-independent fact that animals have essences and that those essences involve being naturally directed to certain ends, then asking “Why suppose it is good for a lion to nourish her cubs?” or “Why is it good for a human being not to become an alcoholic?” is like asking “Why is a Euclidean triangle drawn carefully with a straight edge a better triangle than quickly one sketched freehand?” It’s not a matter of our subjective valuations that the first triangle is a “good” triangle (in the sense of a good specimen) and the second a bad one. It follows from the facts about what it is to be a triangle. And in precisely the same way, it isn’t a matter of our subjective valuations that a lioness that feeds her young or a human being who is free from a compulsion to drink is “better” in the sense of being a better specimen (i.e. healthier, closer to the norm determined by the nature of the organism and what is conducive to its flourishing, etc.). To pretend that this is somehow subjective is essentially to pretend that biological descriptions are subjective — that we call a dog with all of its legs or without cancer “better” than one which has been injured or that has cancer because we like them that that way. But of course, that’s absurd — the descriptions track real features of the organisms themselves, not merely our descriptive practices. (Of course, someone might differ over whether some particular trait really flows from the nature of the thing, but that’s not to the present point. Whatever the features turn out to be, there will be some or other, which is all that matters for the present point.)

Now, again, so far that much is not yet a moral sense of “good.” But as I have said, the moral sense is for the Aristotelian just a special case of this more general sense. And this more general sense has clear objective content. Everyone knows what it means to call a well-drawn triangle a better triangle than a badly-drawn one, what it means to call a four-legged dog a better dog than one which has had a leg cut off, and so forth; and everyone knows that these are in no way subjective claims but perfectly objective ones that reflect a knowledge of the norm conveyed by the natures of the things in question.

Now reason, like any other natural capacity has — IF Aristotelian metaphysics is correct — an inherent teleology, a natural orientation. And the Aristotelian would argue that the natural end of theoretical reason is the grasp of the natures of things and the good for them (in the sense just defined) given that nature; and that the natural end of practical reason is the pursuit of that good. So, asking “Why should a human being pursue what is good for him” is like asking “Why should a Euclidean triangle have three straight sides?” (Obviously you might challenge such claims about the natural ends of reason, but that’s a secondary point. What I’m trying to answer is your apparent view that even given such ends we’d have a “naturalistic fallacy.”)

Now you might say that this is really all somehow just subjective, but what I do not see is how you could have a reason for doing so that doesn’t simply presuppose a Humean metaphysics. In particular, I think that in order to avoid the result that there are at least some standards of goodness that are objective in the sense in question, you would have to presuppose some sort of nominalism on which all essences are just Humean “relations of ideas,” sheer creations of the human mind (good luck doing that coherently and consistently). In any case, what you can’t do is say that even given an Aristotelian metaphysics, statements about what is good or bad of the sort made above are somehow subjective valuations ungrounded in facts. At least, I see no argument to this effect. You seem to me merely to be presupposing the idea that to call something good is merely to evince some subjective reaction to it. And that does not answer my claims at all. It certainly isn’t a plausible response to the claim that a Euclidean triangle drawn with a straight edge is objectively better qua triangle to one that is quickly drawn freehand, or that a lioness that nourishes her young is objectively better qua lioness than one which kills every cub she bears. And if you say “OK, but these judgments of better and worse, though objective, are not better or worse in a sense relevant to morality, ” then you’re just begging the question against the Aristotelian from a slightly different angle. Because in fact that sort of conception of good — moral good as a special case of the sense of “good” operative in the notion of a “good specimen” of a kind of thing — is the conception that was operative in the whole classical tradition (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) before the moderns abandoned it in favor of this subjectivist Humean conception that so many people now take for granted.

As to evolution, you are implicitly assuming that there is such a thing as “the science” that somehow delivers the answers to the metaphysical questions underlying this debate. And that is just what the Aristotelian denies. I’ve noted elsewhere in this combox discussion why the Aristotelian argues that physics cannot possibly be by itself the whole truth about material reality, but needs to be understood in light of an adequate metaphysics. The same thing is true of evolution. And in both cases the correct metaphysics is Aristotelian. The idea that evolution somehow does away with any kind of biological essentialism (and thus any conception of the good of the sort discussed above) really rests not on empirical argumentation, but rather on naturalistic metaphysical assumptions that are read into the empirical evidence.

That’s just an outline. For more on the naturalistic fallacy, the Aristotelian conception of the good, etc., see chapter 5 of my book Aquinas and/or the article I linked to in my third post on MacDonald at my blog. For the most thorough recent defense of bringing an Aristotelian metaphysics to bear on modern science (including biology) see David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism.

Eric:

And it doesn’t seem to me that dguller would disagree with you: being a launch pad for growth to an adult is all the directionality he needs for his argument, and you’re conceding this to him.

Fascinating debate isn’t it? I certainly don’t concede directionality – you are right to have pointed this out. Perhaps the summary paragraph was too oversimplified.

My contention was that if you take a tiger cub as a particular ‘prior state’, at a specific point in time, after some unguided processes it will become a ‘post state’. Repeat. The tiger cub p[rior state may become (as others have said) a post state dead tiger cub, or a fur rug, or something else’s meal, or an adult tiger which may or may not breed successfully, but there is no goal, only an unfolding of processes.

If there was any ‘direction’ at all I suppose you could argue that entropy increases overall, but I don’t think the teleology supporters will want to argue that increasing disorder and the heat death of the universe is a ‘goal’.

Another Matt:

Is he saying that you’re always wrong because you can’t know when you’re correct or incorrect about a causal inference? I’m having a very hard time imagining what the epistemological difference is between a world with metaphysical capital-C causation and obligatory methodological agnosticism regarding causation, and a world with both metaphysical and epistemological uncertainty. I think both worlds would appear the same, but maybe in one we’d have a little less Weltschmerz and would try a little harder.

It is like conceiving of the difference between whether the external world objectively exists, or if solipsism is true. From an epistemological perspective, they are the same, because – or so the thought experiment goes – the subject has the same subjective experiences whether the world exists or not. However, when the subject perceives a cat, then this is a true perception in the case of an external world where a cat is within that subject’s perceptual range, but is a false perception if solipsism is true, because there is no cat at all, because there is nothing outside the individual.

It is the same situation if Hume is correct, and we want to apply causal explanations that aim to uncover the underlying principles and laws that govern the behavior of what we observe. Hume argues that because we never actually observe these laws directly, they do not exist, and so any talk of causal regularity that involves natural laws is ultimately a projection of the human mind upon the flux of nature, which is just one thing happening after another without any underlying order or patterns. So, when you say that X causes Y, then you are always wrong, because X did not do anything to bring Y about, but only seemed to precede the existence of Y. You would always have correlation, but never causation. You might as well say that the night causes the day under this framework, which is ridiculous.

Whatever the truth about Hume is, count me among the Athomists.

That’s fine. 

(I mean this comment to show up in reference to Primates August 24, 2:18)

“But the real difference in the explanation I offered, which you seem to have overlooked, is that natural selection filters not just by physical properties.”

I think I have to disagree. Natural selection comes in several parts. Mutations occur producing a diversified population, the environment filters or sorts the population relative to the differences in phenotype, replication and inheritance ensure that some part of the diversified population is eliminated from future generations. These parts are all just by physical properties. You have not explained why this is not the case.

“After all, the physical property of being able to break down nylon was NOT subject to any natural selection before the bacteria in question were introduced to an environment containing nylon.”

The mutation which allows the digestion of nylon occurs at random altering the
DNA and the proteins produced during growth. This involves only physical properties. The environment changing due to the spilling of nylon stockings into the Pacific creates a change to the environment of the bacteria and does not require special new forces to explain. At this point the bacteria encounter a new source of nutrition and gorge on the tender filaments like pasta. Again no concept of motivation, emotion, look-ahead, intentionality, ends, goals, or purposes need be invoked to explain these phenomena.

I think the conceptual confusion comes from your side of the debate. Biologists have a common sense idea of teleology which does imply intentionality. They reject it for very good reasons. Your definition, coming from a philosophical perspective, assumes a definition which uses words like goals, ends, purposes, etc. which sound like intentionality is involved but then go on to deny it. The terms goals, ends, purposes, functions, etc all are strongly associated with a human perspective on nature, and at the time of Aristotle this was probably quite a reasonable way of looking at things. During a time when forces like gravity and phenomena like inertia, had to wait centuries for Galileo and Newton to explain, physical things needed some push to make them behave as they did. It was supposed, just as humans need emotional motives to do things that perhaps the flight of an arrow needed encouragement through knowing the earth was its mother to which it must always return, or knowing its proper end was in the chest of an enemy soldier. In other words, emotion, motive, and intention were borrowed from the seemingly familiar set of reasons for things with in a human psychological context for use in explaining matter in motion. The language you are using is rooted in a deeply superstitious, pre-scientific time. Whatever relevance or truth your notions contain don’t stand much chance given so much baggage.

So, for scientists, these terms sound like a nostalgic return to something from the childhood of human intellectual thought. If you want to avoid the sales resistance you will have to drop all such language suggestive of human motivation and intention and revert to modern science, which describes nature in terms of matter and energy operating within the uncontaminated laws of nature.

Eric:

As he says: “I would respond that all capabilities are capabilities that point in the direction of specific possible outcomes, and thus inherently involve teleology in this sense.” And I think this is just nonsense. For these capabilities must be, in a sense, present in the original carbon atoms that went to make up the first organic compounds which in turn became the first living cells, and must be inherent in the hydrogen atoms that fuse to create helium which in turn creates beryllium which, if the temperature is high enough, some 100 million degrees Kelvin, to form a stable form of carbon if the there is enough berylliun around to fuse with a third helium nucleus.

Not necessarily. I am fully committed to the possibility of emergent processes from more basic processes, and those emergent processes would be invisible from the perspective of the basic processes. That is why I find Dennett’s stances quite useful, because they are supposed to pick out real patterns in the world, but say that one must adopt particular perspectives in order to be able to observe them at all, and that what is invisible to one stance is clearly visible to another. So, the behavior of carbon atoms is directed by the nature of carbon atoms, and that is all you can see from this perspective. If you then pan out and look at molecules composed of carbon, then you see other properties that were invisible at the atomic level. And if you pan out further, then you see more properties, and on and on. All of these behavioral properties are real, and all of them involve teleology in the sense of directedness towards the possible actualization of certain potential outcomes, but what those possible outcomes are varies, depending upon the stance and perspective that one adopts.

You seem to think that it all has to already prefigured within a carbon atom to be able to become a human being, and I would say that that is true, but not from the perspective of the carbon atom. It would be clear from the perspective of a human being, for example. And that is also why I object to the idea of a singular Final Cause to all substances, because the teleological directedness that all substances exhibit have multiple levels of analysis and explanation, and there is no level of explanation that is more privileged than the others, because they all seem to pick out real patterns in nature, and not just imaginary projections of our minds.

And if you take teleology back this far, you are committed — dguller says no, but I think this is simply wrong — to some kind of theistic solution. Dr. Feser wants us to believe that evolution and theism are separate issues, and can be dealt with independently, and dguller has oblingingly said yes; but I think this is just wishful thinking.

You can surely think that, but I don’t think it follows. Teleology can be an intrinsic part of nature, much like “charge” and “spin” are intrinsic parts of subatomic phenomena. It is an observable part of the natural world, and we must take it into consideration in our modeling of that world. The only thing that follows from this is possibly a First Cause in the sense of Pure Act to underlie all the change that we observe, and that makes it possible to begin with. I think that this is a reasonable argument, although it is possible that quantum mechanics undermines a key premise, but intuitions vary on this issue. And I actually have no problem with this, no more than I have a problem with Spinoza’s “God”. What I disagree with is that this First Cause or Pure Act has any mental properties consistent with a conscious intelligence, and that is what the teleological argument is supposed to show. I don’t think it does, being based upon an equivocation and an analogy, neither of which I find convincing. So, if there is a First Cause that is a mindless pulsating generator of reality that does not care about us or have any grand Final Causes, then what is the objection to such a thing? You might as well object to “energy” and “force”, because they sound spooky and supernatural, even though they are anything but.

Dguller has said, and has said again and again, that even such particles as electrons have direction and purpose, and this is shown (apparently?) by the trajectory they subsequently take. But this is as close to nonsense as I think you can get. What does it mean?

It means that actual electrons have the potential to behave in particular ways, and that electrons, by their nature, point beyond themselves towards the direction of possibly actualizing these potential outcomes. Say an actual electron is in the ground state of a shell surrounding a nucleus. At that moment, the electron has the potential to shift to higher electron shells if sufficient energy is added to the electron. It has not yet shifted position, and only has the potential to, but while it sits in the ground state, it points beyond the ground state towards the possibility of the higher state, if energy is added. And this is not just an imposition of the mind, but rather a real fact of the matter that would be true even if humans had never evolved.

Now, you can call this phenomenon, its “end” or “purpose” or “goal”, or whatever. All of these terms have drawbacks, because they all connote a conscious intent guiding the process. However, so does “natural selection”, and yet it continues to be used, as long as one understands that it is a mindless natural process. It would be like continuing to use the word “dog”, even though one knows that it occasionally can be used to mean something other than a canine mammal. So, to avoid confusion, I prefer to use Aristotle’s term “final cause”, because it is a technical philosophical term, and not an ordinary word co-opted for a philosophical purpose, which runs the risk of unconsciously including other meanings not intended.

Perhaps you would prefer to call this phenomenon something else to avoid confusion? Can we at least agree that such a phenomenon is a real one?

You know nothing about me – you just assumed I knew nothing and know you assume I know nothing about philosophy. What arrogance.

Nylonase gene example – the hell it isn’t. The nylonase gene would be under selection no matter if nylon were present or not. It is part of the genome of the organism and the whole organism is under selection not its individual parts. If the gene is turned on and produces a protein, then there is a potential cost to the organism. In the absence of nylon, the individual will likely have a lower fitness compared to an individual who does not have a functioning gene. Genes are not separate from individuals.

My analogy is a simplification, but not an oversimplification – you just don’t know what you are talking about.

Eric:

It is impossible, in using the language of teleology, to completely separate it from its dependence on earlier metaphysical notions of teleology, in which the directedness and purpose is inherent in things, and this, while conveniently heuristic, is not true to the facts as we see them. Characteristics of organisms are not sorted for function, but for success.

The way that I see it is that you have a few choices here. There is the fact of order and regularity in nature, and that natural substances operate according to natural laws, which govern their behavior in a predictable and reliable fashion.

How does this happen?

Three options:

(1) This directedness is within the nature of the substance.
(2) This directedness is imposed from without by a director.
(3) This directedness is an illusory projection of the human imagination.

We both reject (2), and so that leaves (1) and (3) are possible options.

I prefer (1), because (3) has a number of bizarre implications. For example, if X always causes Y to occur, then what happens when X comes around again? According to (3), there is nothing about X that points in the direction of Y happening, because is what (1) affirms. So, then how can we understand X reliably causing Y to occur if X does not have anything about it that points in the direction of Y’s occurring?

According to such a framework, there is no connecting thread that binds events into a coherent framework, but rather only particular events that stand completely independently of one another, much like Leibniz’s monads. Perhaps the coherent framework that we experience is due to some “pre-established harmony”? Is that a better explanation for the regularity in nature? If you admit any connecting thread between events, then you admit teleology in the sense that we are discussing. After all, any connection will necessarily point from one event to the other by virtue of the connection between them. Only denying any connection would have the result of (3), and that would also preclude the possibility of any laws of nature that guide the behavior of substances in the world, because a law of nature would be such a connecting thread that is operative at all times and in all substances.

And that is why I believe that if you truly accept (3), then you have abolished not only science, but any human knowledge of the world, because our knowledge presupposes the identification of general principles that are operative in the phenomena that we observe. These principles are supposed to connect individual events into a coherent explanatory framework, which is impossible if (3) is true.

I think that is a lot to give up, because (1) could possibly lead to (2). I don’t think it does, and so I can happily enjoy the fruits of (1) while avoiding the absurdities of (3).

I’d prefer to leave the “sieve” example with its association with human interventions and use the sorting that occurs on a beach. As the waves roll in they impart energy which sorts the sand and rock into bands or strata. Denser particles tend to be less jostled and so sort out in layers. The layers which can be easily seen as the denser are of a different color due to different mineral composition. This sorting is not in danger of being confused with intentional use of a sieve – an artifact of culture. The only forces at work at the macro level are wind/wave energy, gravity, friction, etc.
The analogy to natural selection is limited but helpful. It models the differential elimination from a population by the environment, but not the self replication or inheritance which leads to long term change.

Eric:

Sure, Hume was aware, himself, of a difficulty here, and he expresses it in the passage I quoted.

He was aware that his central principle of empiricism contained a self-contradiction, and led to absurd conclusions? Where in your quote did he say that?

All your quote said is that our idea of necessary connection is rooted in our mental life, i.e. our memories of prior instances of X followed by Y (“constant union”), and our imagination that projects X continuing to be followed by Y in the future (“inference”). In reality, it is just one thing after another with nothing uniting them into a coherent framework. Instead, we have our mental categories imposing themselves upon the flux into an ordered framework that is based upon our memories and our imagination, both of which are firmly embedded in our minds, and not about the world.

But to go off from there floating on the rafters of criticism doesn’t face the real issue; for Hume’s foundational assumption, that what we know we know by experience and not by deduction, still holds, and it holds for science.

It does not. Physicists do not say that “energy” and “force” are byproducts of our imaginations, because we never directed experience either one, but only one event after another. They say that both are real parts of the natural world that are operative behind and through our observations, and which actually serve to explain them. Hume explicitly denies that any of these concepts refers to anything real on p. 40 of his first Enquiry. In fact, the foundational assumption of science is that there are laws of nature and general principles that are operative outside of our empirical experience, but which explain it, and allow us to predict to a certain extent the future.

And “deduction” is a red herring. The scientific method involves both careful observation, and both inductive and deductive reasoning. Induction allows us to postulate general principles, and deduction allows us to infer consequences of those principles that we can empirically verify or falsify. That is the scientific method, and so your slur against deduction is misplaced.

Certainly, scientists discover laws — although laws are a bit harder to come by in biology — but they discover them because they are willing to put things to the test of experience — and the relationship of theoretical entities to experience has alwas been an issue in the philosophy of science.

It is not an issue for Hume. He is quite clear that they do not exist, except in our imagination. I’ve quoted him to that effect, and you have failed to quote him saying otherwise.

Hume’s is not a contemptible argument, but a real problem. How do we come to know the laws of science? (Hint: It is not by discerning the essences of things.)

First, I never said it was “contemptible”. I said it was a “crappy” argument.

Second, we come to know the laws of science by using the scientific method. The issue is what is really going on when we discover one. Either we have discovered something real about the world, or we are just describing our imaginary projections upon the world. I would say the former, and Hume would say the latter. Which would you prefer?

And the quote you take from Feser is truly contemptible. No, there are, in my view, no essenses, no universals, in the sense that Feser claims, and as Oderberg, another Catholic with axes to grind, holds. And Hume was not merely describing what was going on in his own head.

Feser was just following Hume’s own principles to their inevitable conclusion, and he is correct. If there are no natures, then what was Hume doing writing an entire treatise purporting to explain human nature? It is an incoherent project, unless one takes him at his word that any talk about “natures” and “essences” is just a byproduct of human imagination, and in that case, he was just talking about what was going on in his imagination.

In fact, he could not even say that he was speaking about what is going on in all human minds, because that would imply that there is a real human nature that he is describing that is operative in all human beings. And how would he know what is going on in the minds of other human beings? His sense impressions of his mental life are only about his own mental life, and he completely lacks any sense impressions of the mental life of another human being. It follows, according to his fundamental principle of empiricism, that the mental life of another human being does not exist at all, which means that his psychological conclusions are simply not generalizable at all to others.

And all of this supports Feser’s interpretation of Hume’s project as an incoherent and contradictory mess. You may not like any of this, because you clearly like Hume a great deal, but it is all consistent with his own assumptions and conclusions.

I’m open to the possibility that I am wrong, but it just seems that you are not understanding Hume on his own terms, and are imposing your own understanding of empricism and scientific inquiry into his works. That is not fair to Hume as an independent thinker, and he should stand by his own ideas, as he presented them, and not in a sanitized and scrubbed form.

Hear, hear!

Another Matt:

Anyway, you might also say (not to put words in your mouth) that the thought that we might wake up tomorrow and find that an electron has escaped from a lithium atom and gotten drunk and donned a pair of clown shoes is only possibly ridiculous given teleology because only with teleology could you even propose that those are not the kinds of things that electrons can do (since that’s a deductive conditional), and that given Humean metaphysics we’re so hobbled that we can’t make that hypothesis because deduction is meaningless, nor indeed can we even justifiably label patterns that we remember from last time (viz. “electron” in this example). I have my doubts that Hume went this far, but I won’t pretend to know Hume well enough to say this confidently.

Our imagination can take things out of the context of their typical behavior in nature, and assign them novel qualities that we would never find in nature. That would be what is happening when you imagine the electron getting drunk and so on. And Hume would agree with this. The problem emerges when you start with Hume’s two fundamental assumptions: (1) Reality consists of a series of independent empirical events, and (2) X is real if and only if X can ultimately be traced to an experienced empirical event. (1) and (2) lead to a number of absurd conclusions, as I have mentioned above. And for the record, intrinsic teleology would falsify both (1) and (2), and that is why Hume’s project is an utter anathema to teleology, and vice versa. They are mutually exclusive.

I think this all hinges on what you think Hume means by “is real.” If that’s a thoroughgoing ontological “is,” perhaps you’re right and his project is doomed. If it’s an epistemological “is” (imagine the phrase “taken as real”) then perhaps it’s saved after all. I don’t have anything personally riding on Hume being right.

Hume was making both epistemic and ontological points. He not only described how we come to know anything, but also described what there is to know in reality. In fact, they are both fundamentally related, because his ontology explains his epistemology, and his epistemology explains his ontology. It all comes as a total package, and thus rejecting one requires the rejection of the other.

dguller,

Eric posted a quote from Hume:

… we can never penetrate so far into the essence and construction of bodies, as to perceive the principle, on which their mutual influence is founded. ‘Tis their constant union alone, with which we are acquainted; and ’tis from the constant union the necessity arises, when the mind is determined to pass from one object to its usual attendant, and infer the existence of one from that of the other. Here then are two particulars, which we are to regard as essential to necessity, viz. the constant union and the inference of the mind; and whenever we discover these we must acknowledge a necessity.

You posted another quote, and commented on it:

“When we entertain, threfore, any suspicion, that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion” (p. 13).

Why doesn’t necessary connection exist in reality, and is only an imposition of our minds? Because “necessary connection” can never be ultimately traced to sense impressions, which are only of particular empirical events. That’s it. That’s the argument. And I’m sure that you can see just how crappy an argument it is.

I’m not sure how it escaped your attention, but in the first quote Hume provides an answer to the question, “from what impression is that supposed idea derived?” Now, if you have the supposed idea that there’s something more to necessity than “constant union and the inference of the mind”, feel free to share the impressions that you derived it from… but I’ll be amazed if what you share can be distinguished from imagination and speculation.

You seem to entirely miss the larger point of what Hume – and many people here – have repeatedly pointed out. Let me try to synthesize what I’ve gathered from reading others here, as well as Hume:

There are certain things we can observe to be the case. From these things we can observe, we can formulate hypotheses which we can test against other observations, and they can be so thoroughly tested that we feel comfortable calling them necessary connections, or laws of nature. But we always remember that they are not deductively necessary, because we did not deduce them from certain premises, we induced them from observations. However, there is no defensible stronger claim which can possibly be made about these thoroughly tested hypotheses. No one can claim that they are deductively necessary, because they are not deductively arrived at. No one can say that they are metaphysically necessary, because no one can observe metaphysical necessity, and the confidence one might have in the metaphysical necessity is ontologically dependent upon the empirical evidence acquired through empirical testing. When empirical testing shows that our confidence in the necessary connection of two things is false – as has happened many times – then any claim of metaphysical necessity is revealed to be a pretense at understanding which had no justification of its own. Metaphysical claims – such as directedness – are parasitic on empirical observations and empirically tested hypotheses; they contribute nothing to what we can be confident we understand, because only after we are confident we understand something can the metaphysician come and tack on his claims about teleology and the directedness of causes. It’s only because we empirically observe regularity in nature that the metaphysician can even seize upon that regularity as an inspiration for speculation. Fundamentally, however, all we have to go on are empirical observations, and all the metaphysical kruft in the world can’t make them a whit more – or less – useful to us in our attempts to understand the world.

Anyway, I think I’m out. I’ve learned a lot in this conversation, and I’ve found it extraordinarily congenial and productive, but I think we’ve reached diminishing returns at this point. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the ~70,000 words of this thread!

@dguller. I honestly don’t know how you manage to write so much! You obviously know your stuff. Since I got back earlier today I have spent ages in making this reply. I hope it’s coherent.

I would respond that correlation is not causation, although causation does involve correlation of a particular type. Correlation would occur when two events happen often in conjunction with one another, such as night following the day, but we do not say that the night causes the day. Causation would involve not only correlation and regularity, but a particular type of regularity in which there is some kind of mechanism connecting the antecedent and consequent events, and I think would involve some directedness from the antecedent towards the consequent events, which an Aristotelian would call a “final cause”.

If correlation occurs consistently, it is the effect of an underlying cause: thus, what causes night is what causes day. However, I see no reason to suppose that the rotation of the earth in the presence of the sun is directed towards the goal of night-and-day or any other consequence such as the 24-hour clock or the electric light-bulb or going to sleep or burgling houses or getting a sun-tan, or colour vision or nocturnal vision or why-bother-with-vision-at-all. The sun shines on the earth and the earth rotates, and the warming and cooling and lightening and darkening have their multitudinous effects. Are we to say that the entire process of nuclear fusion under the gravity of an immense body of gas is “directed” towards the “end” of shining on things, or towards the invention of photo-electric cells? We have reached a stage where we are saying that the fact that things do what they do is the same thing as “directedness”: but it only means that we have observed that B regularly follows A. Is the rotation of the earth and the moon around a common centre of gravity “directed” towards the goal of eclipses, or panic attacks, or human sacrifices? Things which obstruct the sun’s radiation cast shadows (which is to say: obstruction of light = shadow). In effect, the regular behaviour of matter and energy is being defined as “directedness”. But the regular behaviour of matter and energy is the result of (say) an electron simply being what defines an electron. That is all the “directedness” there is. Everything else follows.
Another way of looking at it is this: Every cause is seen as an instance of directedness and every effect is seen as a goal. There is no reason why a “final goal” should be distinguished, any effect will do, and deciding whether it’s a “final goal” depends on selection by us — it’s arbitrary. The interesting thing is the thought-process which introduces “some kind of mechanism between the antecedent and consequent events” and a separation of “directedness” from the one towards the other. In trying to account for the relationship between cause and effect an additional cause, “directedness”, has been interpolated: although it begins from the observation of the nature of electrons and electron shells etc. it acquires a mental life of its own.

But if you actually look at the biological machinery of living organisms, then you will see that they are all geared towards the preservation of survival

Do look at this: “the preservation of survival”. Surely either “preservation” or “survival” are what you mean. Either will do. But if “survival” becomes a final cause, I suppose things will require an additional final cause of preservation of survival. How will they ensure survival if survival is not preserved? Where will it end, I ask myself?

They have a boundary between their interior and the external world, and they guard that boundary to minimize the risk of toxic substances entering the interior and causing damage. They also guard their interiors with an immune system to identify and destroy invaders. They have power plants (i.e. mitochondria) that generate the energy needed to survive. They have waste disposal units (i.e. liver, kidneys, and GI tract) to eliminate unwanted substances. They have a mechanism to allow nutrition to enter their internal milieu, and to transmit those nutrients throughout their organism.

And all the various mechanisms that “ensure survival”. You see, we talk about survival, animals and plants do what they do. We consider “survival” a goal, they just happen to be there. Their goals are things like food, sex, food, sleep, and food. They are there because of cause and effect. So are we. Selection is already survival, so selected traits are survival traits. A goal is not needed, only consequences. Thus, evolution is not even directed towards survival. The existence of living things is just the marvellous interplay of (say) electrons being electrons. All your examples are instances of the argument from design (and one meaning of “design” is “purpose”, and the idea of “purpose” underlies all our uses of the word). But there is simply no reason to suppose that the idea of design, of purpose, of directedness, of a goal, is anything more than an arbitrary view, conditioned by our nature as social animals (as animals, we look for patterns to help us build up a picture of the world; as social animals we think in terms of motive and intention).

What is the point of all of this effort if not to stay alive,

Why should there be a point? My point is that we invent directedness because we seek purposes: “what is the point?”

and why is it so objectionable to say that this is an objective fact, independent of our psychological preferences?

It is objectionable only because we have no reason to believe that it is true, and good reason to believe that it is determined by “our psychological preferences.”

The idea is that the glass’s brittleness is not a reality in the same way that its translucence is.

The brittleness is a potential that has not been actualized,

The brittleness is a property of its molecular structure fully actualised in its being glass. Its shattering is a consequence of its brittleness (molecular structure) when it encounters a sufficient force. “Brittleness” does not imply “directedness”. It is simply a measure of hardness. It’s one of the things we mean by “silica”.

its translucence is actualized by virtue of the ability of photons to transmit through the glass.

The translucence is a property of its molecular structure fully actualised in its being glass. Its clarity is a consequence of its translucence (molecular structure) when it encounters a bombardment of photons.

But regularity is supposed to be indicative of an expected pattern.

I would rather say that regularity is what we mean by an observed pattern. Having observed a pattern, we naturally expect it.

Let us say that we have observed a regularity where A is followed by B, and let us say that we are now confronted with A. We know that A has the potential to lead to B, but this potential has not been actualized yet. We also know that all potential is potential for specific outcomes, but not others, and this involves a direction towards those specific outcomes, in this case towards B.

If there is a regularity where A is followed by B, why do you say that we have seen A, but not yet B? If A implies B, then there is B when there is A. If you are thinking of brittleness again, this doesn’t work. Brittleness is not a potential for shattering any more than translucence is a potential for permitting light to pass. If A has not yet been followed by B, that implies that other conditions are necessary. Therefore, A can only lead to B if C and D and E take place. (Glass allows light to pass only if light is bombarding it, glass breaks only if sufficient kinetic energy is applied, glass melts only if it is subjected to a source of sufficient heat, glass will hold wine only if its molecular structure provides sufficient rigidity and nonporosity and chemical inertness and so on and on).

that is all that teleology is fundamentally about, i.e. something pointing beyond itself towards something else, whether an eventual end or purpose, or a referent for a symbol or sign.

“Pointing beyond itself”. This sounds very mystical. You are saying that the potential for a thing to do A under condition B is pointing beyond “itself”. What is “itself”? A lump of glass? What is “beyond itself”? Being lots and lots of pieces of glass instead of just one single lump? “Pointing”: as when the lump says “I could be simply hundreds of pieces of glass, given the right conditions, of course…” None of this is purpose at all, but it is an exemplar of what actually happens, and it is all that happens.

And in the present moment, when we are confronted with A, A points towards B as the next step, which we can call an end or goal or whatever, but the issue is not the terms that we use, but about the underlying phenomenon that the terms are supposed to refer to.

I think you are wrong about “steps”. The world isn’t a tidy sequence of events; such ideas are what we think with. The world is a whole mess of interactions happening all at once in which we dimly perceive various patterns and after many generations of study have arrived at some fairly reliable idea of what is going on. The issue is the terms we use because they are all we have to describe what we see, and it matters if some people see effects where others see goals; our outlook determines what we see, and if what we really want to see is what is really going on then it matters how we look.

And “just how it is” is that currently existing things point beyond themselves to something else that is not present, and this is the directedness that facilitates goal-directed behavior, and all patterns, in fact.

Well, I dispute that. See above. “Just how it is” is “just how it is”. At rock bottom, if the universe were directed by a supernatural being, that would be “just how it is”. If, on the other hand, the universe were just there, that would be “just how it is”. If there were purpose, or if there were no purpose, that would be “just how it is”. There is no purpose even in purpose. Even if God designed it all with purposes of his own, there would be no ultimate purpose. God’s purposes are just God’s purposes. They serve no purpose except to please himself, which has no purpose. Purposes serve no purpose. They just are. The universe serves no purpose. It just is. Things that look like purposes have no purpose. Purpose has no relevance.

Sure, one could say that, but then you still have the fact that a certain kind of skin points beyond itself towards the effect of improving its survival by camouflaging the animal from predators.

But it isn’t a fact. The skin points towards nothing. It’s skin. It happens to be very lucky skin, but that’s how it is. Lucky skin survives, unlucky skin gets eaten. Is an animal a device for the preservation of skin? Is every cell in an animal’s body an unwitting member of an advanced civilisation? Is every gene?

And Feser’s point is that when the disposition is potential, then it is ultimately teleological in the sense that its potential is for protection

So, back to glass again. Potential is what we see. We know that a pawn can move one square directly forward into an empty square, or one square diagonally if an opponent’s piece is suitably situated. Is the potential in the pawn? Is it in the mind of the player who knows the rules? Is it in the people who invented the rules long long ago? “Disposition is potential” is just a word-game. “Disposition” = “so placed as to be able to do such and such”: “potential” = “having the power to do such and such”. To say “its potential is for protection” is only to project “protection” as a goal. What you have is living things that happen to be around because they don’t explode when they step on the grass and they don’t melt in the presence of mud and they don’t get eaten by cabbages or very small stones. To talk about protection is to project our mindset. Things have come about and we observe their effects. There is no reason to suppose that those effects are goals. We don’t know why there are living things, or why there is mud, but we do know that there are these things, and that is all we know. For all we know, an armadillo is a means to a great and unforeseeable end, but as we can’t foresee such an end we can’t even know if it might be. We just make it up. And what is the purpose of a great and unforeseeable end?

The linchpin of this entire account that saves it from being a tautology is that the trait must increase survival in order for the whole show to get going.

No no no. “In order for the whole show to get going”: What would it matter if it didn’t? And what does it matter if it does? If the show gets going, it gets going. One can point to various features which make the going more or less likely, and observe what happens: yes, it’s going. So (we say), this or that feature is what makes sure that it goes. By which we mean that if A did not occur in the presence of C, D and E, you wouldn’t get B. Turning “survival” into some sort of abstract “good” is no help at all. “Survival” only means “it hasn’t been eaten yet” or “it has kept off the grass”. And anything that doesn’t get eaten or which keeps off the grass will have progeny. And so on. It’s not a goal, it’s what happens.

First, just because our minds are inherently involved in the detection of patterns in nature does not mean that they necessarily create them.

No, but how are we to distinguish patterns that we objectively observe from patterns that we impute by reason of our tendency to look for them?

Otherwise, there would be no way to determine whether our pattern-detecting capacity has resulted in a true positive or a false positive, because it is all just in our heads.

And this is the problem. We have no idea whether there is such a way. All we can do is patiently observe, test our hypotheses, and try to understand ourselves and how we see things. That really is all we can do. Inventing the notion of final causes is interesting as an hypothesis, but is it true? It just has to be tested like everything else. So far, I can’t see any reason to suppose that it is true, and if it were, it would only be “just how it is”.

GordonWillis:

Since I got back earlier today I have spent ages in making this reply.

It does take up one’s time, doesn’t it?! I don’t know what my purpose will be after this thread ends.

Prof. Feser,

Thank you for taking the time for another reply.

In particular, IF it is true as a matter of objective, mind-independent fact that animals have essences and that those essences involve being naturally directed to certain ends,

Which I don’t go along with.  Are you saying your claims about alchoholics/triangles follow tautologically from the above premise?  If so, then you are begging the question – I’m asking if you have an actual argument – reasons for why I would accept your claims vs some other value theory.
However, if you want to say it somehow follows from reason  / argument 
from your conditional statement to a conclusion below,  Then the problem remains:  how much is being smuggled in under propositions like: “(animal) essences involve being naturally directed to certain ends” ?

I do not see why we ought to think of natural propensities, ends  representative of a norm, as being intrinsically  ” good” in any way.
Hence:

then asking “Why suppose it is good for a lion to nourish her cubs?” or “Why is it good for a human being not to become an alcoholic?” is like asking “Why is a Euclidean triangle drawn carefully with a straight edge a better triangle than quickly one sketched freehand?”

I do not see how it follows from your conditional that those don’t remain perfectly good questions.  The only way they would not be is if I fully granted  all the assertions, inferences and reasoning of Aristotelianism.  However, that is precisely what I’m questioning!  

 Another answer to the question “why is a Euclidean triangle drawn carefully with a straight edge a better triangle than quickly one sketched freehand?,” is to say it fulfills the desire of someone seeking to accurately approximate an E-triangle.   It’s a matter of accuracy to a goal – “better/good” still being related to a subjective desire.  None of which undermines what an E-triangle “is.”  The more accurate the rendering to what an E-triangle “is,” the “better” in terms of fulfilling the desire in question.

I find such an approach to understanding “better/good” and related value statements to be more cogent than what you are offering.  You can’t dismiss other possible answers like this out of hand, as you seem to do here.  So it’s still disputable that your conclusion follows from that conditional.  And to try to say it might follow necesssarilly from that initial conditional would reek of 
assuming what I’m asking to see justified.

Hence, when you also say it makes no sense to answer “Why is it good for a human being not to become an alcoholic?” in any other way, it begs the question against pretty much every other value theory that will answer the question differently than you do.   

And in precisely the same way, it isn’t a matter of our subjective valuations that a lioness that feeds her young or a human being who is free from a compulsion to drink is “better” in the sense of being a better specimen (i.e. healthier, closer to the norm determined by the nature of the organism and what is conducive to its flourishing, etc.). To pretend that this is somehow subjective is essentially to pretend that biological descriptions are subjective —

Obviously I disagree.  An alternate view is that our biological descriptions are objective (at least potentially – i.e. if true) but better/good are value statements.  When a biologist finds what she declares to be a “better, good, excellent, magnificent” specimen of a particular shark she is studying,  I find it can best be understood as related to a desire – she may be looking for individuals of a certain size, maturity, temperament,  etc, and whatever individual shark meets her desire she will evaluate on how closely it fulfills that desire.  That desire could also be a desire to see a shark that is indicative of the shark type or paradigm she has in mind.  The shark type may be an abstraction from objective descriptions of many similar “sharks.”
But in strict terms her valuation will have a subjective basis.

I’d add that if you watch biologists in the wild, the enthusiasm with which they can declare a specimen “good/excellent/wonderful/magnificent” betrays the 
connection between their own desire and that specimen’s success in fulfilling the biologist’s desire.  

that we call a dog with all of its legs or without cancer “better” than one which has been injured or that has cancer because we like them that that way.

Actually, all the ways in which I can conceive of calling any dog “better” or “good” only make sense as ultimately related to a desire.  For instance, a dog without cancer is “good” if someone has the desire to have a healthy dog as a pet.  Or if he doesn’t own a dog, to the extent he does not wish any dog to suffer  it would be “good” for a dog to be free of cancer (or have all of it’s legs for that matter).  Or if he wishes to point to a border collie who is representative of the features associated with border collies, he can find a dog that fulfills that desire.  And so on.  ”Good” in the strictly objective sense you are talking about makes no sense to me.  I see no reason in what you have written for why I ought to e persuaded otherwise.

Now, again, so far that much is not yet a moral sense of “good.” But as I have said, the moral sense is for the Aristotelian just a special case of this more general sense.

Which is one reason one needs to be so cautious in accepting your general case, so that unjustified assumptions don’t slip through.

Everyone knows what it means to call a well-drawn triangle a better triangle than a badly-drawn one, what it means to call a four-legged dog a better dog than one which has had a leg cut off, and so forth; and everyone knows that these are in no way subjective claims but perfectly objective ones that reflect a knowledge of the norm conveyed by the natures of the things in question.

No.  Everyone does not know such things!  That presumes your account of an objective “good” is correct, which I and many other people dispute.  We are examining what makes sense of our use of the words “better,” “good” etc.

Is it possible that some people mean by “good” precisely what you argue?  Possibly.  But as we know many people  do not use terms or concepts consistently.   A philosophical value theory attempts to capture what people generally mean by our terms,  and compare what we tend to assume with what we must assume to make sense, which can mean detecting mistaken assumptions many of us make.

After all, you believe atheists aren using the term “good” under some mistaken assumptions.  I’d make the same observation about anyone who thinks they are detecting objective value, rather than being the author of that value.

Obviously you might challenge such claims about the natural ends of reason, but that’s a secondary point. What I’m trying to answer is your apparent view that even given such ends we’d have a “naturalistic fallacy.

One of my points, yes (I think you skirt possibly between a naturalistic and / or a strict is/ought dichotomy).  

RH

RH – loved the post. One comment:

I believe, with a potion of philosophers, that the bridge from fact to value arises from the introduction of subjectivity – goals.

There’s another place where fact and value are in tension, which is where we decide among several seemingly plausible but exclusive interpretations of a set of observational data; I have in mind values like Occam’s razor, , modesty of scope, conservatism, and other of the Quinean web of belief stuff. So while I’m free to believe that day causes night or vice-versa, given other observational data (the sun, tides, data from telescopes, etc.) I may decide that another interpretation fits the data better, accounts for more, or is just simpler, and I may revise it on other grounds later after I have more observation and insight.

Now, I think it’s basically fair to say that the word “fact” can be interpreted as “something that is taken as true within a theory” (since every observation is itself theory-laden — to pick out “things” from the ineluctable stream of experience is to already have a theory of things), which is what led Goodman (I think) to say that “facts are small theories.” What’s neat about this is that our values and scientific methods are themselves under constant examination and empirical testing so in some cases they are actually quite “fact-like” even if formally we would call them “values.” I think this would have made certain philosophers very uncomfortable because you’re supposed to have laid out some methodological system from first principles before you ever get going on the project of observation and induction. But the scientific method is quite a bit more pragmatic than that — there are tons of feedback loops between observation and interpretation and further testing that make things far too complex for any first-principles account to handle. Lucky for us that we have smart people who get to make lots of observations over time.

It’s my hunch that the teleological theories we’ve seen here won’t do very well with accounting for the levels of analysis and feedback loops we seem to observe and which seem to be vital to our current understanding. I’ll have to think about it some more.

I think this shall be my last post in the thread. Thanks to everyone who participated; many thanks to Eric for hosting it and to Prof. Feser for dropping in in a spirit of congeniality. I learned a lot.

You have now restated your description of natural selection in a way that makes me much happier. You have dropped the ambiguous terms like, “goal-oriented”.

“Natural selection is a very picky, goal-oriented sort of sieve”

You have not, in this new description found it necessary to emphasize that there exist non-physical aspects – which I might be interpret as meaning an abstract algorithm or full blown teleology – a la Aquinas. I think, at least, you agree that natural selection has no idea what it is doing when it becomes involved in organic change. It is for this agreement that I think the word “teleological” has been dropped from scientific discussions of evolution.

Gordon:

Thanks for all your time and effort in putting together your response. It was most thought-provoking and offered helpful criticisms of my position. There was a lot in it, and it would take me all day to respond, and so I will only respond to some selected portions of it, if that is alright.

We have reached a stage where we are saying that the fact that things do what they do is the same thing as “directedness”: but it only means that we have observed that B regularly follows A.

Not entirely. It is not just that we have always observed that A is followed by B, because no-one disputes this. Rather, it is about finding a way to understand why A is regularly followed by B, and how it is possible for this pattern to persist in the future.

First, that there is something about A that has the potential to bring B about, and that all potential is a potential for something to become actual. That implies a directedness in A towards the possibility of actualizing B. That’s all that I mean by teleology. Not a goal, or purpose, or end, but only a pointing beyond what is actual towards what is possible, and that this is not just a byproduct of our minds, but a real part of the world that would be present even if consciousness had never evolved in any form.

Second, that when we are confronted by A once again, our inference that B will soon follow is based upon either something real or something in our minds. Again, my contention is that the potential for A to bring about B is a real phenomenon of nature, and that this pointing beyond itself towards the actualization of a possible outcome is an intrinsic aspect of nature. I am not too sure where you stand, but if you disagree with this, then it seems that it is all in our minds, and fails to track real patterns in the world. In other words, it is a fantasy of our imaginations being projected upon a meaningless and incoherent flux of particular events with no connecting thread between them.

In effect, the regular behaviour of matter and energy is being defined as “directedness”. But the regular behaviour of matter and energy is the result of (say) an electron simply being what defines an electron. That is all the “directedness” there is. Everything else follows.

I think it is helpful to keep in mind that my conception of teleology is different from Feser’s. I think that teleology in the sense of actual A pointing beyond itself towards the possible actualization of B, for example, is operative on numerous levels of reality, and that the operations of lower levels can generate emergent properties in higher levels, but both levels have teleological process that I have described. None of those final causes, to use Aristotle’s term for such a process, is Final in the sense that you are operating under, which is that it is the only relevant and important possible outcome of any given event or entity. I think that there are numerous final ends, some dependent upon others, whether “horizontally” (i.e. one outcome depends upon being spatio-temporally preceded by another) or “vertically” (i.e. higher emergent properties dependent upon the behavior of lower events), and (again) none is Final. However, they are all real in the sense that they happen even if consciousness is not involved, even if consciousness can describe them in a variety of ways and different levels of analysis. What is being described and categorized is real, at least as far as I understand it.

Here’s another way to look at it. Say you have three entities: A, B and C. How many objects are there? If you only count A, B and C, then the answer is three. But, if you consider combinations of these entities to also be objects, then the answer is 6 (= A, B, C, AB, AC, and ABC). But, if you consider different orders of the entities to be objects, then the answer is thirteen (= A, B, C, AB, BA, AC, CA, ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CBA, CAB). So, depending upon how you look at it, there are different answers to how many “objects” there are. However, that is just how we choose to categorize three real entities, i.e. A, B, C. Similarly, just because we can chop up nature in different ways, at different levels of analysis, and with different intentions, does not mean that nature does not have an inherent structure that we are studying that is independent of our minds. Atoms behave the way they do irrespective of human beings, but we can study them according to different frameworks, each of which brings out something useful, but only because there are real atoms with certain properties that we can understand in a limited way.

So, do you agree that whether consciousness is present or not, there are real features of the world in which there are actual events that have the potential to result in specific outcomes under certain conditions, and that because those outcomes have not happened yet — because they are just potential — the actual event has a pointing beyond what is actually happening towards what could happen, and that this is an intrinsic feature of the natural world at all levels of analysis?

The brittleness is a property of its molecular structure fully actualised in its being glass. Its shattering is a consequence of its brittleness (molecular structure) when it encounters a sufficient force. “Brittleness” does not imply “directedness”. It is simply a measure of hardness. It’s one of the things we mean by “silica”.

You are absolutely right. I would restate my position as saying that a pane of glass is actually brittle, as you correctly state. However, brittleness has a teleological component in the sense that we have been discussing. Brittleness points beyond the actual, fully intact pane of glass towards the possible shattering under the condition of minimal force being applied to the glass. That is all brittleness means. It is not just a configuration of atoms and molecules in a particular arrangement, but rather what the possible outcomes that follow from that configuration are. And again, once you start talking about possible outcomes, then you are not talking about what is really happening, but about something that could happen, and that implies a pointing beyond the real towards the direction of a possible outcome. And that is all I mean by “teleology”. There is no goal, purpose or end, as you are using those terms, but only the directedness towards a possible outcome, and this restriction is why anything and everything does not happen around us.

If there is a regularity where A is followed by B, why do you say that we have seen A, but not yet B? If A implies B, then there is B when there is A. If you are thinking of brittleness again, this doesn’t work. Brittleness is not a potential for shattering any more than translucence is a potential for permitting light to pass. If A has not yet been followed by B, that implies that other conditions are necessary. Therefore, A can only lead to B if C and D and E take place. (Glass allows light to pass only if light is bombarding it, glass breaks only if sufficient kinetic energy is applied, glass melts only if it is subjected to a source of sufficient heat, glass will hold wine only if its molecular structure provides sufficient rigidity and nonporosity and chemical inertness and so on and on.

Let us say that an HIV infection is regularly observed to be followed by AIDS. Are you saying that if someone is HIV positive, then they necessarily already have AIDS? AIDS is not yet actualized at the time of HIV infection, but AIDS is now a possible outcome, given the presence of HIV in the individual’s body. That is all I meant, and I contend that HIV in an individual points beyond the HIV and towards the direction of the possible outcome of having AIDS, and that this directedness is present in the utter absence of AIDS. In fact, once AIDS is present, then there is no directedness, because AIDS has been actualized.

“Pointing beyond itself”. This sounds very mystical. You are saying that the potential for a thing to do A under condition B is pointing beyond “itself”. What is “itself”? A lump of glass? What is “beyond itself”? Being lots and lots of pieces of glass instead of just one single lump? “Pointing”: as when the lump says “I could be simply hundreds of pieces of glass, given the right conditions, of course…” None of this is purpose at all, but it is an exemplar of what actually happens, and it is all that happens.

As I mentioned above, what I mean that there is a difference between what actually happens and what could potentially happen. “Itself” just means what is actually happening. “Pointing beyond” just means that when something actual happens, then it does not follow that anything can happen, but only certain possible outcomes, and that the actual event points beyond itself towards what is not actual, but could possibly become actual. And none of this requires a consciousness at all. I think that it is an intrinsic part of nature, and actually serves more of an explanatory benefit than saying “that’s just what happens”.

And I think that this raises the important issue of whether we should even try to explain anything at all. Should we just describe what happens in neutral language as one event following another? Should we even try to understand underlying laws of nature that are guiding the behavior of those events in a regular and predictable fashion? And is there a way to understand the world without making any appeals to the concepts of actuality and potentiality, because that is what you would have to reject in order to reject the type of directedness that I am talking about.

And as for it being “mystical”, try explaining “charge” in a way that does not imply an underlying directedness that occurs independent of consciousness. That actually might be a good analogy for what I mean.

I think you are wrong about “steps”. The world isn’t a tidy sequence of events; such ideas are what we think with. The world is a whole mess of interactions happening all at once in which we dimly perceive various patterns and after many generations of study have arrived at some fairly reliable idea of what is going on. The issue is the terms we use because they are all we have to describe what we see, and it matters if some people see effects where others see goals; our outlook determines what we see, and if what we really want to see is what is really going on then it matters how we look.

I agree with you here, but it still follows that there are causal sequences that involve antecedent and subsequent events, and that they are operating according to various natural laws, which we have painstakingly discovered to be true.

Well, I dispute that. See above. “Just how it is” is “just how it is”. At rock bottom, if the universe were directed by a supernatural being, that would be “just how it is”. If, on the other hand, the universe were just there, that would be “just how it is”. If there were purpose, or if there were no purpose, that would be “just how it is”. There is no purpose even in purpose. Even if God designed it all with purposes of his own, there would be no ultimate purpose. God’s purposes are just God’s purposes. They serve no purpose except to please himself, which has no purpose. Purposes serve no purpose. They just are. The universe serves no purpose. It just is. Things that look like purposes have no purpose. Purpose has no relevance.

None of this is relevant to the sense of teleology that I have been discussing. And if you want to say that this is “just how it is”, then we should just stop all scientific inquiry and attempts to understand the underlying patterns around us. I understand that we cannot explain everything, and that there will likely be a number of brute facts that we take as givens, but contesting the use of actuality and potentiality as explanatory of what we observe does not seem to be particularly helpful from my standpoint. And denying that there are regularities that connect empirical events according to natural laws, which is what it would take to deny my sense of teleology, is just too high a price to pay to avoid the possibility of theism.

But it isn’t a fact. The skin points towards nothing. It’s skin. It happens to be very lucky skin, but that’s how it is. Lucky skin survives, unlucky skin gets eaten.

Skin has a number of actual features and potential outcomes, which skin can do that other organs cannot, which is why skin can only do certain things and not anything and everything. And the question to me is why some skin survives and other skin gets eaten? I don’t think it’s satisfying to say that is “just how it is”, and leave it at that. It seems quite clear that some skin in some situations improves the odds of an organism surviving in order to pass on its genes, whether by camouflaging it, or thickening it, or whatever. And skin that has the potential to be camouflage will only be actualized in the situation where it is in the appropriate background environment and in the presence of a predator. Without those conditions, it cannot be considered to be actually camouflaging anything, but only having the potential to do so.

Is an animal a device for the preservation of skin? Is every cell in an animal’s body an unwitting member of an advanced civilisation? Is every gene?

It all depends upon your perspective and level of analysis, I suppose. I would agree that since civilization requires biological organisms, and biological organisms are composed of cells, then cells make civilization possible, when you look at it this way. I don’t think that is particularly controversial, and follows from the fact that if A depends upon B, and B depends upon C, especially in what Aquinas would call a per se series, then C depends upon A. That does not mean that you cannot study A and B and C under different perspectives and assumptions, but it also does not mean that the relationships that exist between them are byproducts of our minds and not present in reality.

No, but how are we to distinguish patterns that we objectively observe from patterns that we impute by reason of our tendency to look for them?

By conducting a scientific investigation, which would involve careful observation, ruling out confounding factors, testing for predictable outcomes, and so on.

And think about what it would mean to actually apply your standard here. We understand other human beings’ mental lives by virtue of mirror neurons that process the observed outward behavior of other organisms and activate our own affective responses, which is supposed to be the root of empathy and mentalizing. Sometimes this system misfires, and we ascribe intentional thought processes to something that completely lacks any. However, we are able to make this distinction and understand the difference between a hit and a miss. We can see where we truly experience something that is really there, and when we are projecting something that is not really there. According to you, this is impossible?

And this is the problem. We have no idea whether there is such a way. All we can do is patiently observe, test our hypotheses, and try to understand ourselves and how we see things. That really is all we can do. Inventing the notion of final causes is interesting as an hypothesis, but is it true? It just has to be tested like everything else. So far, I can’t see any reason to suppose that it is true, and if it were, it would only be “just how it is”.

So, for you, it is possible that all our centuries of scientific study and discovery of natural laws could conceivably all be in our heads, because there is no way to know if the patterns that we observe are real or imaginary?

Any thoughts?

Whatever – I was not rude to you nor did I accuse you of intentionality or teleology. You jumped all over me as if I didn’t know what I was talking about. Perhaps you should read what you write and what others write before you go off. Needlessly adding genetics to a description of selection – is just that – needless. Darwin didn’t know a damn thing about genetics and I believe he sufficiently described selection. One can get bogged down in details or one can get to the point. The sieve analogy explains selection pretty well, even if you don’t think it does. You are reading way too much into this.

Eric:

Without Hume’s warning in terms of the problem, as he saw it, of showing that one thing causes another — viz., the problem of induction, as it has come to be called (Hume only uses the word ‘induction’ once, I think, in all his writings) — science is open to all kinds of charlatans.

Again, overstating Hume’s influence upon science. Do you really think that Hume was the only person to ever realize that it is precarious to generalize from particular cases to universal statements? This was a well-known problem in ancient and, especially, in medieval philosophy. In the ancient world, it was explicitly described by Sextus Empiricus (160-210), for example, and in much the same terms as Hume did.

And if you want to look at the true origins of modern science, then you should look towards the Middle Ages, and such figures as Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040) in the Muslim world, and Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253) in the Christian world. You will find the modern concept of the scientific method described by them, including the role of controlled experiments, mathematical modeling, making predictions to confirm or falsify a hypothesis, the need for publication and confirmation of results, and so on. These ideas went on to influence modern figures, such as Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Boyle, and the rest of the modern scientists, and all by the late 17th century, and before Hume was even born.

In fact, Hume’s influence upon science was minimal until the early 20th century when he was rediscovered primarily by the logical positivists, and it is no coincidence that their principle of verification is so similar to Hume’s assumption that X is real if and only if X can be ultimately traced to sense impressions. And their principle and Hume’s assumption both fail for the same reason, i.e. they cannot be verified or traced to a sense impression. And sure, some scientific luminaries, such as Darwin, have praised his work, but tell me any actual changes in their scientific practice as a result of reading his works, if you can.

It is the scrupulosity of science, and its being a cooperative venture in checking and rechecking its findings — thus establishing that there “really is” a connexion between A and B, which, to our experience, are wholly discrete particulars (which is why science does not simply codify our subjective experience, but very often subverts it) — that permits us to vest so much stock in its conclusions.

Agreed, but all of this was known before Hume.

This problem, set by Hume, has had the effect of actually underwriting the scientific enterprise, because it was a problem at the heart of science that needed some kind of resolution.

You keep forgetting to mention that Hume did not think it was a problem at all. In fact, his “skeptical solution” (in section V of his Enquiry) was that it just a psychological quirk of human beings based upon “Custom or Habit”. We just get used to talking about the world in such a way, and so it comes naturally and intuitively to do so, but the reality is that such talk does not actually refer to anything real in the world at all, and is just a byproduct of our imagination.

What is fascinating about your admiration of Hume is that not only did he not discover the problem of induction, but his solution to the problem undermines all of science! After all, all talk about power, energy and force, for example, is ultimately about nothing, and are incoherent and nonsensical concepts that should be abandoned. Quick! Tell physicists! I’m sure they’ll all happily embrace Hume’s extreme brand of skepticism!

This is why Hume’s philosophy is so important, and why his puzzlement over causation has been so rich in consequences for our understanding of the world. In many ways the philosophy of science is still toiling over this problem, which is why Hume cannot simply be airily dismissed.

I did not “airily” dismiss Hume. I offered arguments for why his position leads to incoherence and absurdity.

Indeed, this is, to a large extent, I think, why so much of Aquinas’s philosophy was so breezily dismissed by the scientific revolution, because it didn’t ask the questions that people were beginning to ask, not only about the world around them, but about themselves and their relationships, personal, political and economic, but purported to answer them in such a determinate way.

That is probably absolutely correct.

And, since history is not an argument, the refutation of Aquinas did not mean that scientists had missed the point, as Feser, I think, suggests, but only that they were asking a completely different set of questions.

Except that “breezily” dismissing the ideas of an individual is not a “refutation” of that individual at all. I can ignore an idea and focus upon another, but it does not follow that I have refuted the initial idea. Certainly, you are correct that the early modern period in which Aristotle and Scholasticism were rejected was one in which the mechanistic conception of the world began to become prominent, mainly due to technological innovations in mechanics. The main rationale for rejecting Aristotle and Scholasticism was actually that it was unintelligible, which made sense, given the underlying mechanistic assumptions that were popular. It would be like atheism being looked upon as absurd in a community of devout religious individuals. I doubt that you would agree that atheism had thereby been refuted.