Instrumentality is the translation of an abstract into a concrete idea, I think. Ultimately, the instrument does not create the desired outcome so much as it comes to embody it. — Pantagruel

As I was reading this part of your text, it struck me it was similar to Aristotle's ideas about causation - the 3D printer is the efficient cause. Teleology comes in with the final cause.

Then you went on to say:

Aristotle characterizes the soul as the end of this body. So, although it is not so much the concept of function that is at stake here (although entelecheia seems to be associated with energeia and therefore with functioning), in the background teleology still plays a role. — Pantagruel

I think all these ideas are related.

Well, without the value of the vision of the goal, the goal itself has no value. So it is the idea that creates the value that realizes the goal.

Well, without the value of the vision of the goal, the goal itself has no value. So it is the idea that creates the value that realizes the goal. — Pantagruel

Value requires judgment; judgment requires criteria. And this, if you follow it 'round, becomes a circle. What is the telos of a kitten? To become a cat. How does anyone know that? Because in every case (where the kitten lives long enough) it becomes a cat. And what is a cat? What a kitten becomes (if it lives long enough).

But a judgment also requires a judge; i.e., someone who values the judgment. Thus teleology is the reification of an idea, the idea bootstrapped from observation and an attempt, at a time when such an attempt in such terms seemed plausible, to give an account of being.

to give an account of being — tim wood

I'd say that reason is ultimately instrumental. Basically, consciousness is teleology. In "gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself" (Nagel) the universe actualizes meaning. Human beings also actualize meaning. Hence the power of actions which fail, but in the pursuit of a noble goal, symbolic actions.

Instrumentality is the translation of an abstract into a concrete idea, — Pantagruel

I'd say that reason is ultimately instrumental. — Pantagruel

Hmm. What is a concrete idea? And how does reason (itself) do any work? I.e., translation requires a translator, yes?

I'd say that reason is ultimately instrumental. Basically, consciousness is teleology. — Pantagruel

Reason is surely teleological. It is ordered towards truth. It is not ordered to falsity in the same way it is ordered to truth.

This is one place where Hume's is-ought theory seems to break down. Reasoning implies 'oughts' because we are ordered towards truth. If I present you with a sound argument, then you ought to assent to the conclusion. Thus when Hume was giving his no-ought-from-is argument, he was ironically deriving an 'ought' from an 'is'. "This is a sound argument, therefore you ought to believe it." Or, "This is true, therefore you ought to believe it."

That said, I don't quite see how teleology and instrumentality are the same thing. Perhaps you can elaborate?

I think that the enactment of an idea would be the abstract idea made concrete.

That said, I don't quite see how teleology and instrumentality are the same thing. Perhaps you can elaborate? — Leontiskos

Well if it is teleological then it is purpose-driven. So then enaction of the purpose requires means, which I would call instruments or tools. Which can be more or less appropriate of the purpose. Id be interested in a comprehensive study of instrumentality, tools, and morphology.

- Oh, okay. Teleology is not purpose-driven in the sense that the entity necessarily devises its own purpose and its own means to that purpose. For example, teleology is present in the plant's being ordered to reproduction, even though there is no instrumentality of means. Thus a teleological entity need not possess intention.

Thomas Nagel has some really good descriptions of the ways in which reality seems to have fundamentally teleological aspects. — Pantagruel

Where, in particular? I’ve read some of his work, which has impressed me deeply, but I can’t recall this discussion in particular (although I do know that the idea of ‘the universe become self aware’ was part of his Mind and Cosmos.)

Instrumentality is the translation of an abstract into a concrete idea, — Pantagruel

I was under the impression that ‘the instrumentalising of reason’ was a criticism of post-Enlightenment philosophy by the New Left. I can’t see how instrumentality is tied to Aristotle’s idea of telos.

Where, in particular? I’ve read some of his work, which has impressed me deeply, but I can’t recall this discussion in particular (although I do know that the idea of ‘the universe become self aware’ was part of his Mind and Cosmos.) — Wayfarer

It's one of the main themes of Mind and Cosmos. As I mentioned, it's a very short book and more than pays back the time invested to read it.

Thus a teleological entity need not possess intention. — Leontiskos

Well, Aristotle articulates a kind of non-intentional teleology. However we are again begging questions. The notion that there could be purpose without intention to me is just "autologically unsound." As soon as you allow purposiveness, you have intention.

It's one of the main theme's of Mind and Cosmos. As I mentioned, it's a very short book and more than pays back the time invested to read it. — Pantagruel

:100:

Teleology would mean that some natural laws, unlike all the basic scientific laws discovered so far, are temporally historical in their operation....Natural teleology would require two things. First, that the nonteleological and timeless laws of physics...are not fully deterministic....Second, among those possible futures there will be some that are more eligible than others as possible steps on the way to the formation of more complex systems....Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps in state space that have a higher "velocity" towards certain outcomes. (Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, pp 92-93)

In fact, experiments in abiogenesis seem to support such a hypothesis. The number of inorganic chemical precursors for a living cell is very high, over seventy. Such that the probability of all of them naturally coalescing within the confines of artificial cell membranes in an experiment was infinitesimal. What in fact happened, was that many of the lipid membranes contained zero molecules, while a few of the membranes contained all of the necessary components. The "desired" complex future state was preferentially selected. Teleology.

Well, Aristotle articulates a kind of non-intentional teleology. However we are again begging questions. The notion that there could be purpose without intention to me is just "autologically unsound." As soon as you allow purposiveness, you have intention. — Pantagruel

For William Paley "teleology" is purposive and intentional, but not for the Aristotelian tradition. Given that you talk about Aristotle in your OP, I didn't think you would be basing your notion of teleology on an 18th century Protestant theologian.

:up:

If I present you with a sound argument, then you ought to assent to the conclusion. — Leontiskos

I also admire T. Nagel, and recommend his The View from Nowhere and The Last Word as superb, challenging presentations of some of these themes.

Leontiskos raises an interesting point about the force of “ought” in a statement like “This is a sound argument, therefore you ought to believe it.” Much as I would like to derive a genuine, non-hypothetical “ought” from “is” here, I don’t think we can. It seems like two responses are possible. 1) The statement is shorthand for “You ought to believe this sound argument if you care about such things as holding beliefs that are based in reason/soundness/fact etc.” 2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it. This is Nagel’s position, by the way, in regard to logical truth.

Of course this leads to larger perplexities about the force of “ought” in any statement. Could there really be a non-hypothetical, categorical, absolute requirement (capital-O “Ought”, as it were) to believe or do anything? I suppose Kant came closest to making a good argument for this, in the Groundwork, where he tried to show that not accepting the categorical imperative was contradictory to human freedom, a kind of self-cancellation. But even here, I don’t know that it’s incoherent to simply reply, like Whitman, Very well, then I contradict myself.

That said, I do believe that religious experience can generate an “ought” of an entirely different kind, but that’s for another OP.

Useful discussion of Aristotle's telos in the IEP.

The word telos means something like purpose, or goal, or final end. According to Aristotle, everything has a purpose or final end. If we want to understand what something is, it must be understood in terms of that end, which we can discover through careful study. It is perhaps easiest to understand what a telos is by looking first at objects created by human beings. Consider a knife. If you wanted to describe a knife, you would talk about its size, and its shape, and what it is made out of, among other things. But Aristotle believes that you would also, as part of your description, have to say that it is made to cut things. And when you did, you would be describing its telos. The knife’s purpose, or reason for existing, is to cut things. And Aristotle would say that unless you included that telos in your description, you wouldn’t really have described – or understood – the knife. This is true not only of things made by humans, but of plants and animals as well. If you were to fully describe an acorn, you would include in your description that it will become an oak tree in the natural course of things – so acorns too have a telos. Suppose you were to describe an animal, like a thoroughbred foal. You would talk about its size, say it has four legs and hair, and a tail. Eventually you would say that it is meant to run fast. This is the horse’s telos, or purpose. If nothing thwarts that purpose, the young horse will indeed become a fast runner.

It's the basis of the idea of final cause, the end to which something is directed. Counter-intuitively, for instance, the final cause of a match is fire (because matches exist to start fires) whilst the efficient case of fire is the match. Generally speaking, since the overthrow of Aristotelian physics by Galileo, the concept of telos and teleology has fallen into disrepute, although I've read that philosophy of biology has found reasons to want to resurrect the idea of final cause.

Much as I would like to derive a genuine, non-hypothetical “ought” from “is” here, I don’t think we can. It seems like two responses are possible. — J

Which of the two responses do you prefer?

2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it. This is Nagel’s position, by the way, in regard to logical truth. — J

Yes, I can see it. On my view people should be forced to submit to sound arguments, but experience shows that they can somehow manage to avoid doing so, and so I don't actually think the 'ought' disappears. But as a Christian I see this as bound up in the paradox of evil, where irrationality is a form of evil.

More concretely, we could consider the second-order question, "Ought we strive for sound arguments?" It seems that if (2) is correct, then we ought to strive for sound arguments. For example, we should be cautious in our reasoning, try to avoid fallacies and bias, and avoid drawing conclusions when we are in overly emotional states of mind. Once the teleology of the intellect is granted, it acts as a center of gravity, pulling other facets of life into a "moral" (or normative) orbit, such as this second-order question.

(Another excellent post, by the way.)

Which of the two responses do you prefer? — Leontiskos

This was a question about how to view a statement like "You ought to believe a sound argument" -- what sort of "ought" do we have in mind here? The two responses I suggested were:

1) The statement is shorthand for “You ought to believe this sound argument if you care about such things as holding beliefs that are based in reason/soundness/fact etc.” 2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it.

Concerning the second, I reread what Thomas Nagel has to say about it (in The Last Word, 77). He writes, "We cannot conceive of a being capable of understanding [logical arguments] who did not also find them self-evidently valid: Nothing would permit us to attribute to anyone a disbelief in modus ponens, or in the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4." Nagel clearly doesn't think you can withhold belief, in the psychological sense, from something you accept as true rationally. I'm not so sanguine about it, but if Nagel is right, there's no issue about "ought" since the believer would have no choice in the matter.

For my part, I think the first response is the better one. As far as I can understand the concept of "ought" in philosophy and ordinary discourse, it is always conditional or hypothetical. Even the bluntest and most heartfelt uses of "ought" ("You ought to do the right thing, just because it's the right thing", "You ought to believe X because it's true") still seem to me to refer back to an unspoken conditional of some sort. Not everyone cares about right things or truth or being rational. Those who do should certainly invoke the "ought" in these examples. But I don't know what force the "ought" could have for those who don't. Robert Nozick, more or less kidding, wrote about an imaginary ultimate philosophical argument so powerful that “if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies”! Short of such a miraculous and cruel syllogism, I really don't know what more could be done to give some firepower to "ought". Which is not at all to say that the concept is dispensable or incoherent. It's just not categorical, not self-justifying.

There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it. This is Nagel’s position, by the way, in regard to logical truth. — J

This seems to entail the instrumentality of reason.

This seems to entail the instrumentality of reason. — Pantagruel

That's interesting. Could you say more about it?

Well, presumably sound arguments pertain to truths that are not trivially evident. So the function of reason is to both understand and to express, translating the intuition of a complex truth that does not reduce to a simple symbolic form (or it would would be immediately self evident and not require an argument). So the capacity of understanding engenders the power of expression, which enforces the belief.

It's one of the main themes of Mind and Cosmos. As I mentioned, it's a very short book and more than pays back the time invested to read it. — Pantagruel

Holy cow, what a difference between you and me. This is one of the many books I've started, and am soon in over my head. I keep going as best I can for some time, hopefully absorbing little bits here and there. Then I move on to the next book, and do the same. Regardless of the difficulties, I absolutely love the book.

Parts of this conversation remind me of Two-Part Invention, the intro to Chapter II of GEB.

@Pantagruel. I see, thanks. I thought you meant there was a specific connection between Nagel's position on logical truth (to understand is to believe) and the instrumentality of reason. But I think you're saying that all reasoning works this way, not just apodictic stuff like modus ponens.

Thanks,

But I don't know what force the "ought" could have for those who don't. — J

In common speech I think ‘ought’ lies between indifference and necessitation. If the doctor tells me, “You ought to drink more water,” he is not calling forth indifference with regard to drinking water, and he is not stating that I am necessitated to drink water. He is apparently appealing to my power of choice and claiming that I should choose to drink water. He is advising.

(To construe this as, "You ought to drink more water if you want to be healthy," is not false, but it can be misleading. This is because most doctors do not treat health as a matter of indifference, as if one might just as well desire to be unhealthy. We should therefore substitute "because" instead of "if", which produces a significant difference.)

It seems like two responses are possible. 1) The statement is shorthand for “You ought to believe this sound argument if you care about such things as holding beliefs that are based in reason/soundness/fact etc.” 2) There is actually no choice in the matter at all, since to understand the soundness of an argument is to believe it. — J

It seems to me that (1) represents indifference and (2) represents necessitation. If this is right, then neither one can represent an ‘ought’, and oughtness instead lies somewhere between them.

Even the bluntest and most heartfelt uses of "ought" ("You ought to do the right thing, just because it's the right thing", "You ought to believe X because it's true") still seem to me to refer back to an unspoken conditional of some sort. Not everyone cares about right things or truth or being rational. — J

I think the controversial premise here is <not everyone cares about truth>. The intuitive opinion follows Aquinas in claiming that the human being is intrinsically ordered to truth (which is also what grounds Nagel's idea). It seems that someone who holds to (1) must contradict this and maintain that human beings are indifferently related to truth and falsity. Namely, they must hold that the human being is not ordered to truth any more than it is ordered to falsity. But this seems to be incorrect.

In the Metaphysics Aristotle defines true and false, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (IV-7). If someone were indifferent to truth they would say false things as often as they say true things, and they would intend to say false things as often as they intend to say true things, and they would do this even when “talking to themselves” or reasoning privately. They would consider foundational principles like the principle of non-contradiction false as often as they considered them true. But none of this is the case, and therefore human beings are not indifferent to truth. I think this can also be seen by giving Nagel’s (2) its due, for the claim that humans are indifferent to truth would be a complete repudiation of Nagel’s arguments, and this seems implausible.

But then what is the force of a claim like, “You ought to believe X because it's true”? It’s hard to say what the exact force is, but I aver that it is easy to see that it exists and that it lies between indifference and necessitation. No one responds to that challenge by saying, “I grant that it is 100% true but I am going to go ahead and not-believe it anyway.” The only question here is whether X is true, not whether we ought to believe true things. And going back to my <original point>, when Hume presents us with an argument he is implicitly claiming that we ought to assent to it.

At the end of the day, in these questions I think a tertium quid is breaking through a false dichotomy. Positing only indifference or necessitation excludes ‘oughts’ from the outset. Or if you like, non-hypothetical ‘oughts’. My suggestion is that if we avoid that dichotomous presupposition, the truth-ought emerges with just as much certitude as anything else.

(Somewhat relatedly, a lot of people seem to think, “Because they can be ignored or argued against, therefore duties do not exist.” I would respond, “If duties could not be ignored or argued against, then they would not exist.” Of course my interlocutor might respond that what does not make its presence felt need not be ignored. But surely our “duty” to truth makes its presence felt, yet without forcing our hand.)

As far as I can understand the concept of "ought" in philosophy and ordinary discourse, it is always conditional or hypothetical. — J

This should probably be left for another post, but let me say just a short and insufficient word so as not to ignore it. I tend to disagree, as I think most ‘oughts’ are not purely hypothetical. Suppose I went up to a serial killer and said, “Hey, there’s an old lady who lives at the end of the lane. All of her neighbors will be away on Saturday. She removes her hearing aids at 9 pm. Just letting you know. ;)” That would be a purely hypothetical ‘ought’! But I don’t think most ‘oughts’ are like that. I think most ‘oughts’ involve non-hypothetical aspects, even though they also contain hypothetical aspects. Following Kant, we tend to hold that any ‘ought’ which is not categorical is hypothetical. I don’t think that’s right. There can be different shades and weights of duty.

The intuitive opinion follows Aquinas in claiming that the human being is intrinsically ordered to truth — Leontiskos

There are many interesting and insightful things in your post that I'd like to respond to, but I have to confess my almost complete ignorance of Thomism. So first, could you expand on what Aquinas means by "intrinsically ordered to truth"? I'm guessing it has something to do with an essential nature of human beings, possibly involving an Aristotelian telos? But I'd welcome some help here.

Maybe it's not so much not believing the truth that you can't deny as it is not caring. The Architect told Neo that the Oracle "stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99% of all test subjects accepted the program as long as they were given a choice. Even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level." For a more real-world example, how many happily married people would say they do NOT want to be told if their spouse is cheating, because they would rather have the blissful lie? As Cypher said, ignorance is bliss.

There are many interesting and insightful things in your post that I'd like to respond to, but I have to confess my almost complete ignorance of Thomism. So first, could you expand on what Aquinas means by "intrinsically ordered to truth"? I'm guessing it has something to do with an essential nature of human beings, possibly involving an Aristotelian telos? But I'd welcome some help here. — J

Sure, that’s fair. For my purposes in this thread, when I speak about being “ordered to truth” I am thinking, first, that the human being is not indifferent to truth and falsity; and second, that truth is primary rather than falsity, and this is what my arguments above aimed to show.

I actually think Aristotle’s discussion in Metaphysics IV-4 is a good point of entry, and in the paragraph that followed my comment about Aquinas’ opinion I was trying to give a shortened form of that argument.* In Aristotle’s text he is showing that one cannot believe that the principle of non-contradiction is false, and from this I draw the conclusion that we are not indifferent to truth and falsity with respect to the principle of non-contradiction. Nagel’s point that we cannot disbelieve an argument that we see to be sound is similar, and it seems to show that belief corresponds to (perceived) truth.

* If we wish to look at Aquinas himself, there are two relevant premises: 1) The intellect is ordered to truth (as opposed to falsity), and 2) The human being never acts apart from the intellect. Cf. Summa Theologiae, I.Q85.A6, I.Q16, and I.Q17; De Veritate, Question 1

@Leontiskos Thanks, that helps. You’ve raised some complex and difficult issues here. Maybe the best point of entry is the beginning of your paragraph about the “indifferent speaker” :

If someone were indifferent to truth they would say false things as often as they say true things, and they would intend to say false things as often as they intend to say true things, and they would do this even when “talking to themselves” or reasoning privately. — Leontiskos

Here, “indifferent” is being used in the sense of having no preference, overall, between truth and falsity. Aside from a certain former president, I agree that it’s difficult to imagine such a person doing this continually. But I don’t read you as describing a person who doesn’t know the difference between truth and falsity. Indeed, you speak of them as intending truth when speaking truthfully, and falsity when not. So that’s one sort of indifference: I can tell X from Y but have no preference or allegiance or “ordering to” one over the other.

But then you offer this:

They would consider foundational principles like the principle of non-contradiction false as often as they considered them true. — Leontiskos

Here, I think, “indifference” is being applied in a new sense. Now the speaker doesn’t know the difference. They’re not merely indifferent as to their choice; they can’t tell them apart. Here I’m with you and Aristotle and Nagel: I can’t believe in a person who can explain the law of non-contradiction but not acknowledge its validity.

But, going back to the first sense of “indifference,” surely it’s still possible for the “indifferent speaker” to take this position: “Yes, I recognize truth and falsity quite well, but I am indifferent to them in this case.” Or, of course, they might say, “I actively prefer what is false, again in this case.”

By bringing up individual cases in this way, I think we move into another difficult aspect of the question: When we talk about things like Aristotelian ordering, are we speaking about what is the case for all humans all the time, or allowing that exceptions can be made? (Perhaps it’s a telos for the species which we haven’t yet achieved?) We might say, as an analogy, that the human species has evolved so that mothers, and by extension families, care for their young. As a general rule, this is unexceptionable. But we know it’s possible for a particular parent, in a particular situation, to fail to follow this rule. (It’s not necessitated, in your terminology.) Is “being ordered to truth” like that? Or are we saying that there is a human nature so hardwired that it’s literally impossible for anyone, anytime, not to show a preference for truth over falsity? I doubt we could maintain this. Indeed, if we could, the issue of “ought” would be moot. Every example would be covered by the “Nagel rule”: You can’t help but think/believe/say it.

Similar questions would apply to the doctor situation. It’s true that doctors assume, as a rule, that their patients desire health, but it’s not outlandish for some hedonist to say, “Sorry, I’d rather live at 100mph and die young, thanks all the same. Hold the water!” So you need a real, if unspoken, premise that says, “Follow your doctor’s advice if you want to be healthy” -- and many do not. It’s not that one might “just as well” desire to be unhealthy because one is indifferent to health, or can’t tell the difference between good health and illness. Rather, one has made a choice to value something else more.

We agree that “it’s hard to say what the exact force is” of a claim like “You ought to believe X because it’s true.” Given what I’ve written above, there are some cases where we’d say “You ought to believe X because . . . no, wait a minute, it’s a ‛Nagel truth’ so you already believe it!” Those aren’t the problematic ones (though very problematic indeed for those who don’t think Nagel truths – self-evident or analytic truths – exist). The case of concern is one where we want to say, “You ought to believe X because it’s true (though not self-evident) and because human beings are creatures with a certain ordering to truth. You should believe this particular true thing because of the sort of creature you are.” Sadly, this just puts us back into the general/individual distinction, it seems to me. The nonbeliever can always reply, “I quite agree that humans have evolved this way, and I certainly practice this most of the time. However, I am not hardwired to do so in non-apodictic truth-claim situations, and in this case, I will choose not to.” So our “ought” remains hypothetical, and our interlocutor is rejecting our hypothesis for themselves, in this case. They’re saying, “I don’t accept the translation of ‛if’ into ‛because.’ I interpret your statement as ‛You should believe this particular true thing if you want to be the sort of creature you are. Well, ‛the sort of creature I am’ is one who may be ordered to truth but can also choose not to believe some instances of it. So that’s what I’ll do.’ ”

(I want to fess up to something that has really started to puzzle me, though. I’m starting to think that the whole “you ought to believe X” thing is kind of unreal, a philosopher’s thought-experiment. What exactly would it mean to “not believe” something, if you also thought it was true? What are the actual examples of this? Are we talking about belief as a psychological experience, or as a theoretical assent to a proposition? We all know that if I’m asked, “Do you believe water is H2O?” the questioner doesn’t mean “Are you having a mental event right this moment that consists of believing X?” Beliefs can be unthought, background conditions. So which kind of “belief” have I been claiming, rather glibly, that it’s possible to refuse to true statements? I need to think a lot more about this, so it’s in parentheses.)

As you say, the “ought” question is huge and deserves its own thread/book/library. So does Kant’s view about imperatives. I appreciate the light you shed on the possible nuances between categorical and hypothetical oughts, and for what it’s worth, I find some nuances in Kant as well. I’ll watch for the next Kantian ethics discussion.