Maybe the fact that we can't help but lapse into teleological language when talking about nature is a sign we ought to take finality more seriously as part of the package when speaking of causality?

I think the problem causing all the fuss about teleology is taking it to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

A thing’s purpose is whatever it is good for, regardless of whether or not anyone created it with that use in mind. Our use of the word in the blackbird case demonstrates that we are generally okay with this sense of “purpose” in everyday speech.

I think the field of teleology should be refocused to not look for purpose-centric descriptive explanations of how things came to be, but instead prescriptive accounts of why things should be, what they’re good for, what is a good end, what is good in a consequentialist sense; as a separate but equally important question from what means are good, or right, or just, in a deontological sense. What are we aiming for, and how best to get there.

Purpose is a language game we play to try to make sense of the world. It's useful, and it's value extends only as far as it's usefulness.

What are your thoughts on "structure equals function" in relation to this? On a cellular level, there is not much variance in use for a particular piece unless it is, for example, a duplicate. Something's function and shape influence and match each other, a process that is seen in natural selection. But larger, more complex, and aware things generally have more leeway into what something's usefulness can entail.

We can attribute usefulness to something, that is, a door can be useful for keeping things out or it can be used as a life raft in a flood. Things can also be useful insomuch as we value them. Keepsakes and sentimental trinkets are a good example, as their "usefulness" is in the value we place on them for physically embodying memories and emotions. The door example is more practical, while the trinket one is more arbitrary; however, both are ways something can be considered useful.

The context something is in can also determine usefulness. Fins are useful for moving through the water, but hardly for moving on land. I think it would be possible to conceive a situation where fins could be useful on land, but it probably would not be for movement. This is another idea seeable in natural selection. Things are only more useful, that is, more adapted if they pair well with the environment they are in. I think it was in The God Delusion that Dawkins talked about bird wings and their usefulness. He was saying that having 50% of a wing could still be useful in that, though it couldn't be good for flying, if that bird was in a state of free fall the air resistance it would cause would help to break the fall, even if by just a little bit, which could be the difference between surviving the fall or dying.

I think it is important for us to not count things out based on our current understanding of them. Everything changes, too, so someone that can barely lift an ax today could in theory be the world's strongest lumberjack later in life. I think our potential to change is an inseparable part of what we are and is much broader than we often realize.

Sorry if this is not what you were trying to get at, though.

A thing’s purpose is whatever it is good for, regardless of whether or not anyone created it with that use in mind. Our use of the word in the blackbird case demonstrates that we are generally okay with this sense of “purpose” in everyday speech. — Pfhorrest

This doesn't avoid teleology, because to say that something uses something toward a good, implies teleology. So to say that the blackbird uses its wings for the purpose of flying is to make a teleological statement.

I never said I was avoiding teleology, just that teleology isn’t all about what good the creator of something had in mind when they created it, just what good anyone can use something toward however it came to be.

A thing’s purpose is whatever it is good for, regardless of whether or not anyone created it with that use in mind. Our use of the word in the blackbird case demonstrates that we are generally okay with this sense of “purpose” in everyday speech. — Pfhorrest

I think its useful to have a distinction between purpose of use and purpose created for. I could create create a golf club for the purpose of playing golf, and that purpose isnt changed if someone decides to use it, re-purpose it, as a weapon to smash in someones head. It was created for the purpose of playing golf And later used for the purpose of murder. Neither purpose negates the other and the “use” for the purpose of murder doesnt change what the golf clubs purpose was/is because there are two senses of the word “purpose” at play.

Just curious, are you famililar with Terrence Deacon and if so do you mainly agree with his theories like absential phenomena? He talks about how teleology can come about from systems.

I don’t think those are two different senses of the word purpose, those are just two different ideas about what it’s purpose is.

Its both. Its two different ideas about the purpose of the golf club (as a means to play a game and as a weapon) AND it is two senses of the word purpose (purpose created for and purpose in use).
Do you think that the purpose of something is the same as the usage of something? That seems like a clear distinction to me.

Do you think that the purpose of something is the same as the usage of something? — DingoJones

I think a purpose (there can be more than one) is what something is useful for, and the use that the creator of something had in mind is but one case of that more general sense, not a different special sense. Uncreated things, or things created accidentally, unintentionally, with no purpose in mind, can nevertheless have purpose, if they are useful, good for something.

Ok, so can something have a purpose that it isnt useful for? What about something that has a purpose but it isnt really that useful to that purpose, or at least mot as useful for something else?
Also, could you address the lack of mutual exclusivity I mentioned? It seems to me it can be both, and thus my point about different senses of the word being used stands.

Ok, so can something have a purpose that it isnt useful for? — DingoJones

I think to “have“ a purpose is the same thing as to “be useful for” a purpose, and so if a thing is not useful to some purpose, that is not a purpose of it (a purpose it “has”); that’s not something it’s good for.

Also, could you address the lack of mutual exclusivity I mentioned? It seems to me it can be both, and thus my point about different senses of the word being used stands. — DingoJones

I don’t understand this question.

, I was thinking whether this stuff would be a better fit over in the language section.

Purpose is a language game we play to try to make sense of the world. It's useful, and it's value extends only as far as it's usefulness. — Voyeur

Maybe something similar could be said for causation...

In the house example, we start from purpose, have no hesitation to assign purpose, including when the house is not used or built yet.
In the wings example, we come to speak of purpose from observed plain use, what they do, then suppose or impose. In an alternate universe, ostrich wings have turned out used for deterring and combating predators, and so their purpose might be said to be weapons.
My heart pumps blood around the body, so we say that's its purpose, because that's what it's doing; but the purpose of an artificial heart is to replace the heart.
Some might go as far as to say that a purpose of trees is oxygen production from carbon dioxide.

Houses, wings, photosynthesis, etc are along for the ride; houses are ours at least.
Is there a faint residue of sufficient reason in such thinking, in seeing teleology via purposes (that are plain use), like the principle accidentally betrayed us?

I think to “have“ a purpose is the same thing as to “be useful for” a purpose, and so if a thing is not useful to some purpose, that is not a purpose of it (a purpose it “has”); that’s not something it’s good for. — Pfhorrest

I understand. So what about things that have a purpose/usefulness but do not fulfil its purpose particularly well, or even poorly? Would that change anything? Like, you could use a spoon to cut bread but it seems strange to say thats the purpose of the spoon doesnt it? Its what you are using the spoon for, not what the spoons purpose is. If you were cutting bread with a spoon and someone who did not know what the purpose of a spoon was asked you what the purpose of a spoon was would you say “cutting bread”? You might explain to them about purpose being what something is used for but at that point you are describing a different sense of the word. You might say “the spoon wasnt made with cutting bread as its purpose, but thats what im using it for now so thats its purpose” and to me that sounds like two different kinds of “purpose”. One the purpose intended, the other purpose its being used for.

The reason I would not say a spoon’s purpose is to cut bread is precisely that a spoon is not very good for / not very useful for cutting bread. It is slightly useful for / good for cutting bread, but we don’t really have the language to say something is “a slight purpose” or such, so we have to say that it either is or isn’t a purpose, and a spoon is so bad for cutting bread that we’d lean toward the “not its purpose” option, even if it can kinda be used for that purpose.

Some might go as far as to say that a purpose of trees is oxygen production from carbon dioxide. — jorndoe

To a weary traveler, the purpose of trees, or a particular tree, might be shade. To Siddhartha Guatama, a tree serves as the setting for the transformation into Buddhahood. It seems these purposes (and any others you or I or anyone can think up) are defined simultaneously. If teleology is a particular pattern or use of language, this is fine, but if anyone believes that teleology as an objective characteristic inherent to the substance (material or otherwise) of an object, that seems dubious to me. As I understand it, this is essentially the Aristotelian view, although I accept that you can read in a healthy degree of nuance into Aristotle's thoughts on the subject if you so choose.

Is there a faint residue of sufficient reason in such thinking — jorndoe

I think it's the other way around. The idea of the principle of sufficient reason is a residue of the way we think and speak about things. We find the concept of "purpose" useful, and therefore we continue to apply it to larger and larger contexts, eventually (mistakenly) trying to apply it universally. That universal application is what we call teleology, and it's a not necessarily incorrect, it's more a red herring as to what is really going on. We should focus on our propensity to ascribe purpose to phenomena, not on the phenomena and it's "inherent" purpose.

Right, but you said its purpose is what you are using it for. I used a spoon to make it clear that you can use something for a purpose it wasn't intended. Under your view this would never be the case. Instead of spoon, we could talk about different qualities of knives...all purposed for cutting but some purposed for cutting certain things in certain ways etc and it would be the same thing. Eventually it will come down to different senses of the word “purpose”, different contexts of the same word (“purpose”).
Maybe this is semantic...what about if we make a distinction between the purpose of something and the usage of something? (As opposed to a distinction between two usuage of “purpose”).
Does that make it more clear what Im getting at? That you use something for a task doesnt mean that task is its purpose. If that were true, then in some sense the spoons purpose is to cut bread. (In the sense thats what you are using it for, but NOT in the sense that the spoon was made for a specific set of uses (scooping, stirring, transferring contents of a bowl etc).
Your notion that its a matter of degree to which the thing is useful for a purpose can be countered by a different example, a necklace. The purpose of a necklace is to look good or show status or whatever. Its also very useful for strangling a person wearing them. If our clueless friend from my spoon example asked “what is the purpose of a necklace?”, what would you answer? Even if you have used necklaces to strangle people before, I think the answer is still clearly “its purpose is as a fashion accessory” (with whatever Purpose you want to assign to fashion accessories).

Right, but you said its purpose is what you are using it for. I — DingoJones

No, I said what it's useful for.

You can use something in a way that it's not very useful. Obviously it has to be at least a little bit useful otherwise you won't be able to use it at all, but there's no problem saying, while using spoon to cut bread, "this spoon isn't very useful for cutting bread".

Well ok, but there was more to what I said than just that.

Yes, I certainly know Deacon. He is taking the same systems science approach, using his own jargon. So he naturalises finality the same way.

I was thinking whether this stuff would be a better fit over in the language section. — jorndoe

You could have a restrictive definition of the word that make purpose only what some conscious mind has decided. But science wants to model the causes of things. Aristotle recognised telos as one of the four “becauses”. Systems scientists stand against material reductionism precisely because they feel it makes sense to recognise the teleology inherent in even the most basic material laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Darwin’s evolutionary law.

So you can have those different language communities.

Tension arises in the scientific arena as reductionist science was founded on the explicit rejection of meaning and purpose in the physical universe. What happens in nature is meant to be due to blind chance.

Systems science agrees that blind chance is fundamental. But then form and finality emerge to give cohesion and direction to that. So nature also develops its habits and its purposes - even if these are embodied as a structure of constraints (information) rather than as “deliberations within some mind”.

Well ok, but there was more to what I said than just that. — DingoJones

Sure, but the bit that I responded to was the crux of it; the rest hangs on that misunderstanding.

There's what something is useful for. This is purpose most generally.

There's what something was made to be used for. This is just a narrower case of the above.

There's what something is being used for. This must be at least marginally a case of the first thing above, since you can't at all use something that's not at all useful, but if it's not clearly a case of it -- if you can kinda use something, but not very well -- then we would normally say that it's "not useful" (even though we're using it anyway), and therefore that's "not its purpose" in the first sense above, regardless of the second sense above.

We find the concept of "purpose" useful, and therefore we continue to apply it to larger and larger contexts, eventually (mistakenly) trying to apply it universally. That universal application is what we call teleology, and it's a not necessarily incorrect, it's more a red herring as to what is really going on. — Voyeur

But why are folk happy to call those same fundamental constraints of nature “laws”?

Linguistically, laws might be considered as human-constructed abstractions. And that can be opposed to nature having some kind of generalised will and intent - like a rather concrete human act of conscious deliberative choice.

Yet still, it seems just as problematic to abstract away the causes of being - paint them as unplaced laws - as it is to be over concrete and say every physical event needs to serve “someone’s” reason.

The reality of causation - at the general physical level of the Cosmos - needs a jargon that steers between both extremes.

Are there any differences to his approach and yours? I do like that he acknowledges the Cartesian Theater problem right off the bat. Are you familiar with that problem?

Are there any differences to his approach and yours? — schopenhauer1

I only skimmed his books as I was already deep into the same material. He was kind of an annoying figure as he was pushing the same line but as if he was the only one who really understood things.

At the time, it felt more important within the academic setting to be showing how many different voices (systems science, hierarchy theory, cybernetics, complexity theorists, autopoiesis, semioticians, etc, etc, were saying the same thing). And then Terry comes along as if he just invented the paradigm. :grin:

But I can’t remember any important differences. My view was that he was right but wasn’t saying anything taking the discussion forward. Having said that, I’ve added him back to my reading list. He was a decent populariser. And definitely did latch on to the right arguments fast - just so fast he hadn’t connected with others who had travelled the same path.

I do like that he acknowledges the Cartesian Theater problem right off the bat. Are you familiar with that problem? — schopenhauer1

Sure. That is a big reason for a shift from the cogsci model of psychology to a more modern enactive, embodied, ecological, etc, model. The step from Cartesian representationalism to a Peircean semiotic perspective,

Yes, I think I can pick that up from him.

The Cartesian Theater I see is linked directly with the Hard Problem. It keeps people honest with the question at hand..dont try to pull a rabit out of a hat and call it a solution. Im still getting into the part about "absential" phenomenon. Thats his original contribution I think. Whats your thoughts on that?

More importantly, what's your take? (Further/other dimensions to this stuff?) — jorndoe

There's an interesting Wikipedia article on the word 'teleonomy' which is a neologism that describes 'the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by natural processes like natural selection’.

Bolds added.

Article goes on

Colin Pittendrigh, who coined the term in 1958, applied it to biological phenomena that appear to be end-directed, hoping to limit the much older term teleology to actions planned by an agent who can internally model alternative futures with intention, purpose and foresight:

Biologists for a while were prepared to say a turtle came ashore and laid its eggs. These verbal scruples were intended as a rejection of teleology but were based on the mistaken view that the efficiency of final causes is necessarily implied by the simple description of an end-directed mechanism. … The biologists long-standing confusion would be removed if all end-directed systems were described by some other term, e.g., 'teleonomic', in order to emphasize that recognition and description of end-directedness does not carry a commitment to Aristotelian teleology as an efficient causal principle.

A further passage notes that:

Haldane [in the 1930s] can be found remarking, ‘Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.’ Today the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’.

I question the distinction and the conceit of ‘apparent’ purpose. I think it all goes back to the abandonment of Aristotle’s fourfold causation as an aspect a consequence of the scientific revolution. This wants to see literally everything in terms of the non-intentional causation that can be understood through the paradigm of physics.

Note also the implications for the nature of reason. Whereas in the Aristotelian attitude, ‘things happen for a reason’, in the modern view, things are determined by material causes - for no reason, in the classical sense.

This is a central theme of Max Horkheimer’s book The Eclipse of Reason:

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer

(See for example the current thread The Grounding of All Morality, which is based wholly and solely on the bolded passage. )

Im still getting into the part about "absential" phenomenon. Thats his original contribution I think. Whats your thoughts on that? — schopenhauer1

Absentials are his way of talking about constraints. So I both agree with what he says, but don’t see it as original - at least within the systems science community.

The essential issue here is the difference between thinking of nature in terms of causal determinism and causal regulation.

It is is usual to imagine causality as a Newtonian system of impressed forces on material bodies. That is, a metaphysics of material/efficient cause.

A constraints-based metaphysics, like semiosis, cybernetics, hierarchy theory, etc, would instead say that nature operates on the principle of what is not forbidden is what can, and must, happen.

So reality is understood as basically free - a state of radical indeterminism or Peircean tychism. Everything tries to happen. But then global organising constraints evolve to impose top-down order on the chaos. The chaos is regulated by the new thing of form and “purpose”. A Newtonian looking world is what emerges in the limit of this natural ordering. We arrived at the “continuity” of law which is Peircean synechism.

This way of looking at things can eventually be applied rather directly to our biophysical models of life and neurobiological models of mind. That’s what I talk about all the time. :nerd:

So in a wide variety of approaches which I endorse - Friston’s Bayesian Brain, Walter Freeman’s chaos theory, etc - consciousness has its particular character because the brain is a system for eliminating potential information states. It doesn’t compute some representation of the world so much as eliminate the near infinite variety of possible states of interpretation that could exist in regard to that world.

In that way, it is all about arriving at the particularity of a point of view - a state of pragmatic action - by constraining alway all unnecessary possibilities and thus leaving to freely happen what is left after that.

This speaks to the open character of our mental processes. The work is not to discover what is real. It is to eliminate alternatives to the degree our behaviour appears to be functional.

And that flipping of the paradigm is “absential” in that constraint is about the ability to eliminate alternatives. You arrive at counterfactual definiteness by having suppressed thoughts about everything else.

That is why attention is seen as a spotlight. As a neural process, it is literally a wave of inhibition that sweeps over the brain after about a third of a second (the p300 EEG potential) and so focuses our consciousness by suppressing every other state of interpretation we might have had.

And words function semiotically the same way. I say to you “pink elephant”. You now share the same mental image to the degree your mind can suppress other colours, other animals, indeed other objects.

But Indian or African elephant? A cartoon elephant or maybe an actual elephant got up in bright colours for a religious parade?

I didn’t say. So those become open minded degrees of freedom so far as that speech act went. And even if I kept adding constraints to be more specific, we would never expect to arrive at the same “beetle in the box”. There would always be residual indeterminism in the semiotic view.

But that is no problem for the non-Cartesian. All the (pragmatic) work that needs to be done lies on the side of the absentials. Consciousness is an example of a process in which it is the elimination of alternatives that turns the general into something specific. That is its deep “computational” logic.

And a ton of scientists get that. What is not widely understood is that this is a paradigmatic shift for science or philosophy itself. That is because most scientists just work this out within their own siloed domains.

So Deacon is good as a voice able to proclaim that general revolution. But as I say, he didn’t do enough to connect himself to the interdisciplinary community and so wasn’t regarded as a leader.

His first book felt it rather ignored the Vygotskeanism and social constructionism which was already vogue. Likewise Incomplete Nature felt as if it failed to attend to the broad changes of thought to be found in theoretical biology and neurobiology.

However that is only a mild complaint - a bit of social context for how his contributions were received.

What Haldane said. :up: