Without getting into the many issues I have with that, it doesn't seem to be specifying a different sort of freedom, with a focus on what exactly "free" is referring to ontologically in different cases. — Terrapin Station

You may construe it as a recasting of the philosophical concept of freedom. It is indeed the very same intuitive concept of freedom of agency that grounds the reactive attitudes of ordinary people, but it is being recast away from its usual distortions by scientistic, crypto-Humean and crypro-Cartesian prejudices. It does not require rollback indeterminism (that is, the possibility that one may have done otherwise in the exact same antecedent 'circumstances'), but it doesn't accommodate determinism either since the antecedent 'conditions' (often construed as a set of atomic Humean 'events') of the agent become irrelevant to the determination of the agent's action by herself, in accordance only with her reasons, good or bad, for doing whatever she is doing.

What different sort of freedom would you say we intuitively ascribe to the will? (Do I do this if I don't know the answer to it)? — Terrapin Station

The common intuitive conception of free action, which seems to me to be broadly correct, rests on a form of agent causation rather than event causation. Agent causation tends to give Humean philosophers headaches, while Aristotelian philosophers account for it more easily. Free actions are actualizations of the powers of practical rationality possessed by mature rational animals. Hence, the causal antecedents of free actions are substances (e.g. rational animals) and their freely (and responsibly) endorsed reasons rather than fixed antecedent circumstances and blind laws of nature.

If we're talking about free will it's obviously not severed from will phenomena. But yes, the issue (freedom a la free will vs detereminism) is only coherent as wondering about whether it's possible for at least two different consequent states to follow the same antecedent state. — Terrapin Station

I think it is obviously coherent. For instance, both the radioactive decay or the absence of radioactive decay of an atom are consistent with the same antecedent (non-decayed) state of this atom. Likewise, regardless of the indeterminacy of fundamental physical laws, the modelization of cognitive processes as coarse-grained outcomes of a chaotic dynamical system make different actions consistent with the very same (coarse-grainedly) defined antecedent mental states. Both those possibilities, which are intelligible from the physical point of view, seem not to secure the kind of freedom that we intuitively ascribe to the will.

I'm simply referring to the conventional conversation re focusing on the ontological question re whether one sort of phenomena or another (can) obtain in conjunction with will. — Terrapin Station

Fair enough. But then, it would appear to be part of the conventional conversation about the will (conceived as the faculty that issues in intentional actions) that it involves some sorts of intelligible connections between antecedent mental states of agents and their subsequent actions. It is true that those connections generally are believed not to be fully determinative. But then, the challenge for the libertarian incompatibilist is to explain how the mere lack of full determination of actions by antecedent psychological states (and its replacement by mere randomness) is helpful at all to the ordinary conception of personal freedom.

What would be a "robust concept" of ontological freedom? — Terrapin Station

"Ontological freedom" is your term. @Relativist and I had issued a challenge for your own conception of what it might be, since it appears to us to amount to nothing over and above mere indeterministic randomness in the production of bodily movements, while severing their connections with the will construed as a psychological faculty.

I don't see the point as trying to "salvage" anything. We're simply wondering whether ontological freedom obtains in relation to "will phenomena," so that more than one option is a possible consequent state given identical antecedent states. It seems to some of us that such ontological freedom does obtain. We're not campaigning for anything in this, not issuing value judgments about anything, etc. — Terrapin Station

Very well. But then very many philosophers might inquire whether such a very weak concept of 'ontological freedom' (which seemingly amounts to nothing more than the the mere indeterminism or randomness secured by quantum mechanics) has any connection at all with the traditional philosophical questions regarding rational agency and freedom of the will.

But that's just changing what we're referring to in the conversation. No one in the debate was using "free" to refer to whether a choice is a product of the agent's mental processes or not.

So it's not compatibilism, it's "redefining what the words are referring to so that we can use both of them in conjunction with each other." — Terrapin Station

I wonder who you take to be the proper authority for the definition of the concept of freedom. Most people who are party to the conversation (which I take to include philosophers engaged in the debate about free will and determinism) acknowledge various conceptual and/or constitutive connections between the concepts of freedom, desire, rationality, belief, intention, praise and blame, responsibility, etc.

Is that not free enough for you? Do you insist that true freedom entails being sufficiently free to make a different choice given exactly the same set of deciding factors? That seems absurd - because it implies a freedom to make choices for no reason at all. — Relativist

I was just about to post a similar response/challenge to @Terrapin Station. On the one hand, I am myself a libertarian incompatibilist, just like TS. But my position is distinctive from what I like to call "rollback libertarianism'. Rollback libertarianism rests on one particular construal (which I dont endorse) of the principle of alternative possibilities (which I endorse!), but which is endorsed by many libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane (with some caveats). Under this construal, it must be possible for a free agent who actually did A that she could have done something else (or merely abstained from doing A, or could have done A differently) in the exact same 'circumstances' in which she actually did A, where those 'circumstances' (so called) are construed as including her own actual mental states and proclivities up to the moment of decision. I think you are absolutely right that this sort 'contra causal' criterion for freedom seems to threaten the intelligibility of rational action and hence to undermine what it seeks to salvage.

I mildly object to saying a decision is predetermined. Saying the decision was "predetermined" can be interpreted to mean the same decision would be made irrespective of the cognitive processes the agent engages in. I stress that the agent's specific cognitive processes were necessary to the reaching of the decision, even though no other decision could have been made given the full set of characteristics of the agent. This is relevant to avoiding fatalism. An agent's role is an active one. — Relativist

Yes, I quite concur with your mild objection ;-) But if it is right, it also threatens the cogency of the doctrine of determinism, on my view. On your view, on the assumption that determinism is true, the agent's decision is being jointly determined by the external constraints that the agent is being subjected to and, also, by the intrinsic characteristics of the agent. Hence, since the agent's own character and cognitive processes are involved in the determination of her behavior, her personal responsibility for her actions (and hence, also, the propriety of reactive attitudes towards her, such as gratitude and resentment) aren't necessarily threatened by the (alleged) falsity of the principle of alternative possibilities.

But that means, also, that what is usually being construed by hard determinists and by libertarians alike as "the past" isn't entirely removed from the scope of the responsibility of the agent. It is, in a way, through the ongoing process of practical reasoning (and the present operation of all the cognitive processes enabling the power of practical reasoning) that "the past" gets funneled into intentional action and hence that choices are being made by the agent between her various (seemingly open) opportunities. This process would be deterministic (and hence only one option would by genuinely open at any given time) only if there were deterministic laws of nature governing what intelligible actions follow from an agent's 'total' circumstances (i.e. her external circumstances and opportunities, and her intrinsic cognitive characteristics). I am prepared to argue that there can't possibly be any such laws. There can't be any such laws irrespective of there being, or there not being, deterministic laws that govern the evolution of sub-personal neurophysiological processes. (My view of the causality of rational agency is a combination of substance causation and of rational causation, rather similar to those defended by E. J. Lowe and by Eric Marcus, broadly following Aristotle and Kant, respectively.)

Yeah, i would say that's just determinism, then. I don't see it as a semantic issue, really. I don't think it matters what we call anything. I just don't see how we can have both ontological freedom and ontological determinism at the same time (whatever we call them). — Terrapin Station

You dont seem to be disagreeing with the thesis Relativist presents in the original post, then. S/he is arguing that personal and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. This is not the sort of compatibilism that you are disagreeing with.

Not if "no alternative decision could have been made." — Terrapin Station

The thesis here being defended by @Relativist is purportedly compatibilist while resting on the rejection of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). If you construe a possible "alternative decision" as an "alternative possibility", which is consistent, that is, with the past state of the universe and with the laws of nature, then, there are indeed no "alternative decisions" that are genuinely open to an agent if determinism is true.

I take it, however, that when Relativist speaks of alternatives, s/he is speaking of a range of options that merely appear open to the agent, for all she knows; since a deliberating agent never (or very seldom) is in an epistemic position where she would know in advance what decision she is being predetermined to make.

Hence, Relativists's position could properly be termed a form of semi-compatibilism. John Martin Fischer argues for such a position, claiming that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility although it precludes alternative possibilities. Depending on whether you define "free will" as requiring the truth of PAP, or as resting only on the criteria of moral responsibility, you might say that semi-compatibilism doesn't or does, respectively, allow for the compatibility of determinism and "free will". This issue becomes a matter of mere semantics.

@Bitter Crank, @jamalrob,

Thanks, thanks!

Is there a simple way to know what category a discussion has been posted in? I normally display "All Discussions" and then click on the discussions that interest me. When a discussion is displayed, I can't see anywhere what category this discussion has been posted in, other than trying to find it trough selecting sequentially all the plausible categories in which it might have been posted. It's strange that discussions and individual posts are seemingly displayed without a category tag visible anywhere in them.

pierra you are changing the subject however. The subject is not about consumerism. But that is the economic theory that you have now introduced. It is a non sequitur. Also known as a red herring. Fallacy. — hks

I was replying to your claim that reversing climate change is a waste of precious resources. You are claiming this because you also seemingly believe that mankind doesn't have the power to prevent climate change. But, as I've argued, it is our massive consumption of fossil fuels that currently drives the unnaturally fast rate of global warming (in opposition to the natural Holocene cooling trend that had taken place since the Climatic Optimum, about seven millennia ago, up until the industrial revolution). Taking this fact into account directly refutes the main premise of your argument.

(...) Do you care to join us on this reading group Pierre? — Posty McPostface

For sure. I may not be able to participate assiduously, but, if this gets going, I'll likely comment occasionally.

There's also a lot of Wittgenstein in Kripke or known as Kripkenstein. — Posty McPostface

'Kripkenstein' is a reference to Kripke's particular take on Wittgenstein on interpreting a rule, which he (Kripke) expounded in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. The topic is quite different from the topic of Naming and Necessity.

Futilely wasting precious resources on reversing climate change is a terrible waste not conservation. — hks

Mankind currently is actively reversing the natural trend in climate change (from slow cooling to fast greenhouse warming) through wasting non-renewable fossil fuel reserves.

What would be normal, I think, is a very slow drop in atmospheric CO2 concentration. — Pierre-Normand

Or maybe a very small rise over the next few centuries.



The atmospheric CO2 concetration rose from about 260ppm, ten millennia ago, to about 275ppm, two centuries ago. It then shot up to over 400ppm following a curve that matches the global anthropogenic emmissions with an almost perfect correlation.

Human beings have an influence on that change as does every other species but to what extent we just don't know... yet. — TWI

We don't now exactly, which is why the IPCC, for instance, provides a probability density function for climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas forcing. The warming that we can expect to occur as a consequence of doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 concentration (and thus generating a forcing of 4W/m^2) thus is likely to be between 1.5°C to 4.5°C.

(In response to @hks) Except that it isn't. What would be normal is a much, much smaller and slower rise in CO2, and a consequent smaller and slower rise in global warming. — Bitter Crank

What would be normal, I think, is a very slow drop in atmospheric CO2 concentration. What primarily drove the alternation between the glacial and interglacial periods over the last few million years were the Milankovitch cycles. CO2 concentration goes along for the ride (as well as ice-albedo, also providing a feedback, and hysteresis, to the climate system). The last glacial period ended about 14 millennia ago, and the global temperature peaked around 7 millennia ago, during the Holocene Climate Optimum. Since then, the global temperature slowly fell down until roughly one and a half century ago. During the last few decades, the global temperature rose up very fast as much as it had fallen over the previous seven millennia (about 1°C). This occurred at the same time when we increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by more than 40% and is explained by it, and also, to a lesser degree, by the increase in concentration of other non-condensable greenhouse gases such a methane, CFCs and nitrous oxide. The recent warming is thus, indeed, quite unnatural.

One scenario in which all of those premises are true is when we assign "F" to all of V, T and H. — Terrapin Station

If you assign "F" to all three propositional variables, then, in that case, the second premise, (¬V→H), evaluates as false.

Is this valid by some odd technicality? Is it just straight up valid and I cant see the inference? — garberdude

Why does it strike you as odd? The first premise asserts that virtue is a sufficient condition for Tim's achieving heaven while the other two premises jointly entail that lack of virtue is a sufficient condition for Tim's achieving heaven. Since Tim must either be virtuous or lacking in virtue, a sufficient condition for Tim's achieving heaven is realized in all cases. The truth table reflects this.

So the drama of her finger-spelling "awakening" was overplayed. — apokrisis

Good points. So, she may have been rather more like Ildefonso (and less like Victor, the feral child) than habitually portrayed. But she may also have regressed quite a bit, socially, when she lost sight, and hence, by the time when she picked-up language learning again, regained something that had very much etiolated. The Piraha Amazonian tribe borrow many words from their Brazilian neighbors but nothing of the grammar. Since the difference between symbolic and pictoral representation is mainly a matter of logical grammar, I am thinking that Keller may have been very much like Ildefonso and his fellow languageless companions (described in Susan Shaller's book) in using signs pictorally rather than symbolically. Ildefonso and his companions had an extensive gestural "vocabulary" that was completely devoid of proper names or abstract names. The gestures were rather highly variable and idiolectical means of conveying narratives with immediate practical significance, very high contextual dependence, and a minimal degree of abstraction.

Yet you can't even respond to a whole post or answer questions posed to you in posts. — Harry Hindu

It isn't bad practice to request clarifications before proceeding to respond "to a whole post", especially when your interlocutor seems to be contradicting himself or to be equivocating between two senses of a word. In any case, back to your question...

Again, if you go back and re-read my previous post, you will see that I made the argument that learning a language is just another experience we have that changes us. Every time we acquire knowledge of some sort it changes us (our selves), and if we have a complex system of communication then we can create new words to refer to those new things, just like how languages have evolved to reflect our new knowledge. Think about the change humanity went through in how it viewed itself when we realized the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and that we weren't separate from animals.

Let me ask you PN, what is the thing that was there that changed? — Harry Hindu

This is actually a quite difficult question. The answer varies somewhat accordingly whether we are looking at language acquisition on an ontogenetic or a phylogenetic time scale. When a young child (or someone like Ildefonso or Helen Keller) learns language, this process changes him/her. But when homo sapiens became a talking animal, it also changed what kind of an animal homo sapiens had become in a radical way, which @apokrisis described in general terms. It made homo sapiens into a different sort of social animal that henceforth could develop and pass on a symbolically mediated culture. This culture isn't merely a possession but also a way of being; and the inhabiting of a symbolically mediated culture is a very specific way of being. I think your question focuses primarily on "the thing that was there" prior to language learning on the ontogenetic time scale, in the case of a single individual. But the answer to this question must also look up to the change that occurred on the phylogenetic time scale since this later change has made homo sapiens into an animal that is, by its (new) nature, an essentially encultured animal.

Hence, a human child normally is an apprentice whose maturation process is deeply embedded into a scaffolding dynamics of connivance in its interactions with mature adults (and with elements of the preexisting surrounding material culture). Connivance here refers to the process, well illustrated by Ildefonso's initial attitude to his teacher, driven by a willingness to conform to social norms without prior understanding of their significance or justification. This understanding comes later, in the normal case. But in the case where a child is deprived from the opportunity to learn a symbolic language, the process of acculturation can nevertheless proceed albeit in a way that makes the individual more dependent on the ambient cultural scaffolding. Hence, Ildefonso, for instance, was very conformist and unable to autonomously endorse or question social norms. He could reason practically about the world since he had mastered varieties of means/ends connections but his modes of practical reasoning weren't articulated with modes of theoretical reasoning, as is the case with a language user, since theoretical reasoning requires abstraction and abstraction requires (or, at least, normally is grounded in) symbolic representation.

So, what it is that was "already there" prior to the formation of a self (and self-consciousness) that is specifically shaped by the acquisition of linguistic abilities (and of part of the symbolic cultural stock thereby mediated)? Well, the child, the animal, was already there. In the case of a modern human being, it's an immature child that was already there. The pre-linguistic child has an immature self that isn't very much different, in some respects, from the self of a mature chimp or gorilla. However, in other respects, as the case of (pre-linguistic and pre-tamed) Helen Keller illustrates, and the case of (pre-linguistic albeit tamed) Ildefonso illustrates to an even higher degree, the human child is quite different from non-human apes. This can be accounted for by the early effects of the scaffolding dynamics that serves as a necessary prelude to language acquisition.

The human child is first taught to conform to social norms and hence to distinguish the proper from the improper way to do things, and varieties of ways to successfully achieve varieties of ends. Soon thereafter, though, her abilities for practical reasoning outruns the merely conventional forms of behavior that she can emulate since she can reason autonomously about their propriety. In the case of the languageless Ildefonso, his socially scaffolded abilities for practical reasoning outgrew those of a normal pre-linguistic child but lagged behind those of normal children whose abilities develop explosively when practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning come to enrich each other through the mediation of abstract concepts.

No. It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation when I keep refering to avideo that you and Apo refuse to watch. — Harry Hindu

I watched the whole video before posting my first comment in this thread, thanked you for the reference, and commented on it. I even transcribed a bit from the video in my first paragraph. I also acquired Susan Shaller's book A Man Without Words (2nd ed. University of California Press, 2012), which provides a much fuller account than the short documentary, and read about one third, so far. I also read the useful critical comments on Wikipedia (The talk page also is worth looking at). Apo also referenced a blog article discussing Ildefonso's case.

I guess you're not going to watch the video that I posted the link for that shows that contradicts your previous post, and pretty much everything else you've said, but that's your problem, not mine. — Harry Hindu

It's very difficult having any sort of a meaningful discussion with you when you keep oscillating back and fort between the stances that your thesis does and doesn't contradict your interlocutor's thesis. So, whenever I or @apocrisis purportedly contradict something that you said, you reply that you never denied what it is that we are claiming, and that it always had been your own position all along. So, according to you, we ought to be in full agreement. And then, almost in the same breath, you proceed to claim that what your interlocutor argued for is false and that it had been refuted by the arguments and evidence that you already have presented. Which is it? Do you agree with what we are saying or do you take yourself to have refuted it? You can't have it both ways.

(Maybe if you would make a little more effort disentangling what it is that you are agreeing with from what it is that you are purportedly disagreeing with you would find that part of the confusion stems from some equivocations relating to the insufficiently analysed concept of personal identity.)

All he is describing is a change in himself, not that the change was that he discovered himself. — Harry Hindu

However, you've been consistently arguing that the acquisition of linguistic abilities doesn't change "what is already there" regarding the structure and nature of the self but rather merely enables the subject to communicate it or express herself with words. But both Ildefonso and Keller seem to be making the point that they were changed. The acquisition of language changed what was already there, in a fairly radical way, and went far beyond the mere enabling of the communication of it. It changed what was there to be communicated.

Hmm. Telling, hey? — apokrisis

It is very telling. Thanks for the reference to this blog. Thanks also to @Harry Hindu for the reference to the documentary. I hadn't heard of Ildefonso's story before. I was also struck by this comment from his teacher in the Vimeo documentary: "...And to me, it was as if he was seeing things for the first time. And that's when I realized language changes human beings. And it's one of the reasons why he can't talk about being languageless. He told me once: 'I don't know what it was like to be languageless because language changed me.'"

When I heard this I was immediately reminded of a similarly striking commentary by Helen Keller about her own languageless past:

"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith."

Quoted from this blog: 'Ms. Keller describes that famous moment when she realized that the finger-movements in her hand meant “water” in this way:

"That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought."'

Here is another one: "No man ever steps in the same river twice..." ascribed to Heraclitus by Plato.

David Wiggins(*) has argued that Heraclitus likely never held the misconception about identity and material constitution that grounds this attribution to him.

* See his Heraclitus’ Conceptions of Flux, Fire, and Material Persistence, reprinted in Continuants: Their Activity, Their Being, and Their Identity: Twelve Essays.

You can't derive an ought from an is. — Sam26

Yes, it is misleading but it does have a point, though, which is to warn against the naturalistic fallacy.

You can't prove a negative. — Sam26

As soon as I read your thread title, this is the saying that immediately came to my mind!

The next one that I though of is from Schopenhauer: "A man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." It only sounds true when we confuse intention with desire. (Lars Hetzberg explains best what's wrong with this saying, without mentioning it specifically, in his paper On Being Moved by Desire.)

What happens? — Posty McPostface

Is this a philosophical question? It has been tested empirically.

I would hesitate to put Wittgenstein's philosophy into any category (...) — Sam26

I've heard it from a credible source that he was some sort of a Wittgensteinian but I don't know if it's true.

What the Brennan passage seems to say, and what I think is crucial, is that the forms of things are known directly and immediately, because of the innate capacity of 'agent intellect' to know forms (which is 'noesis'). But the sensible object is known only mediately, precisely because it is external, other, or separate from us, physically. So what is known directly is the form/type/essence which is not exactly the same as the material object of perception - hence, 'hylomorphic dualism'.

Now, there's another matter, which is the fact that objects appear to us as a unified whole, not as form on the one hand, and matter on the other. And that, I take to be the issue which Kant addresses in the 'transcendental unity of perception.' — Wayfarer

I agree. While the form is brought to bear by the perceiving subject on the content of her experience of an object, it isn't brought to bear on it in a separate act from the perception of the accidents of this object. It is rather brought to bear to its object in the very same act in which the accidents of this object are being perceived. (Here, I am using 'object' to designate a substance rather than a propositional content).

That doesn't sound nonsensical, but it is also not what I was commenting on. What I took the passage I was commenting on to say was that the hypothetical tree/chair/apple, the perception of it and the subject of the perception, are all one and the same - which I take to be a naively realist analysis. — Wayfarer

You may have misread him, then. What he had written was: "The object informing the subject is identically the subject being informed by the object." (my emphasis). The two items that are being identified, it seems to me, are acts of powers "...informing..." and "...being informed..." and not two individual substances. To claim that those two processes -- the act of an active power of perception, and the corresponding act of a passive power (of being perceived) -- are numerically identical may be construed as a claim of direct realism albeit not necessarily as a claim of naive realism. As a claim of direct realism, akin to J. J. Gibson's theory of perception, it amounts to little more than the rejection of representationalism. It is not naively realist since there is no assumption that the perceptual capacity that is essentially involved in the act of perception isn't richly conceptually informed and/or constitutively dependent on the biological nature of the perceiving subject. Those 'subjective' features of the perceiving subject, however, don't stand in between her and the perceived object in the manner representationalist epistemologies (such a Cartesian epistemology) conceive mental representations to stand as merely proximal ('representative') objects of perceptions.

Well, it seems to me that this is a defense of naive realism. I'm sorry to say that I think the first sentence verges on the nonsensical, as it implies that you are whatever you are looking at - chair, tree, or whatever. — Wayfarer

That doesn't sound nonsensical to my ears. It might be nonsensical if the 'object' of perception were conceived as the individual (substance) that is being perceived. But if we rather consider this 'object' as the content of the perceptual experience, and this content is conceived as being propositionally articulated, then it makes sense to say that the content of the experience is identical to what it is that is being experienced, in the case where there is no illusion or misperception. That's broadly the disjunctive conception of perceptual experience (and knowledge) defended by John McDowell, among others.

The disjunctive conception of experience also dovetails well with @Dfpolis claim (following Aristotle) that, in the act of perception, the 'object' and the 'subject' are ontologically united without any epistemic gap in the sense that the actualization of the subject's power to perceive an object and the object's power to affect the subject's capacity for perceptual knowledge are the joint actualization of one single power, since those two powers can't exist separately, and neither can they be actualized separately. (This is true also in the case where the capacity for knowledge is structured in a 'constructivist' fashion, and is actualized by means of complex and protracted cognitive processes).

That is not nearly as weird as it sounds. Compare the power of a glassful of water to dissolve a sugar cube and the power of this sugar cube to be dissolved in water (i.e. its solubility). Those two (unactualized) powers can only exist together and they can only be actualized jointly. Furthermore, the actualization of the power of water to dissolve sugar and the actualization of the power of the sugar to be dissolved in water, when they are actualized jointly, are constituted by one single (numerically identical) process. (@Dfpolis's example of the builder building the house and the house being built is even better.)

I think you get biological teleology wrong. The way you describe it, teleology arises from individual organisms' striving to achieve a goal, much like Lamarck thought that when a giraffe reaches for higher branches its neck grows progressively longer with each generation (he even hypothesized a causal mechanism for this: a "nervous fluid"). We know that this is not how evolution works (for the most part). Fitness does not increase as a direct response to organisms' strivings and desires. — SophistiCat

Yes, indeed. I am not arguing that the fitness increase is a direct response to the organisms's strivings. That would characterize a Lamarckian process and would run afoul of the consequences of the separation of the somatic and germinal lines. I am rather pointing out a frequently overlooked feature of Darwinian evolution through natural selection (among independent germinal variations) that is indirectly dependent on organisms' strivings (both behavioral and physiological). Those strivings are already teleologically structured on the time frame of ontogeny. Their evolutionary consequences cross-over to the time frame of phylogeny because, while the sorting action of natural selection is, in a sense, blind to the organisms' strivings, the raw material that it is selecting amongst doesn't merely consist in variations in genotype but rather in variations in effectiveness of the (teleologically structured) phenotypes for achieving whatever it is that the organisms already are striving for.

So, my commitment to determinism in the realm of physics does not commit me to determinism in the realm of intentional operations of knowing subjects. — Dfpolis

I think I may be in broad agreement, although I understand Kim's principle of the causal closure of the physical to be restricted in scope (further than he acknowledges) rather in the same way in which you are restricting the scope of determinism. (Classical) physical systems are deterministic for the very same reason why they are (physically) causally closed. And that's because when they are being considered in abstraction from the formal features of their organization by virtue of which one can ascribe intentionality, teleology and/or active powers (or normative functions) to them, then, in that case, their purely physical behaviors have sufficient physical causes. Such physical systems, however, considered as such, always are generalized abstractions from real empirical phenomena that generally fall under non-physical predicates (that don't reduce to physical predicates). Physical systems therefore are of special interest to physicists but aren't ontologically fundamental.

Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, provides a simplified and I believe a more realistic version of the principal divisions of knowledge. He divides theory from practise, such that in comparison to Plato's divisions, theory is assigned to the intellectual realm, practise to the visible. (...) — Metaphysician Undercover

This post is golden. There is much food for thought, and for further study, there. Thanks!

So the feature was highlighted for selection by the organism's quest to survive. I'm not sure that will generalize, though. Consider the moths who turned black because they lived in a town that was covered in coal dust. The white moths were all eaten by birds. The black moths weren't trying to hide. And I can't think of some behavior they were engaged in that links turning black to their quest to survive. Can you? — frank

I agree that there are cases, such as this one, where the organism is entirely passive with respect to the natural selection process. But I am also happy to concede that, in such cases, the feature thereby selected (viz. the moths's being black) can be fully explained causally in a non-teleological manner. Other mechanisms of evolution, such as genetic drift, likewise, are non-teleological. Nevertheless, the internal functional organization of an organism's physiology (and behavior) does provide specific directions (or ends/teloi) to the selection process. In short, I am arguing for the irreducibility of teleological explanations, not for their being the sole forms of explanations of all the inherited features of organisms.