Sure, but I'm playing with concepts. The way we tend to talk about these things might not be the best, and it may be that the philosophical problems with each are the same.

Or, developing one of @Moliere's examples, "This table appears like an external object, but is really a product of your subjective experience". Notice how similar this is to "This table appears like an external object, but is really a construction of your brain".

Everything is mental.

I just want to suggest that if one is arguing for a telos, one can dispense with intention, which has strong connotations of conscious purpose, even if it can be defined to exclude all psychology. Aristotle himself doesn't depend on any psychology in his notion of final causes, i.e., on intention as conscious purpose.

It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description. — Moliere

I think this could be an important point. One could even draw a distinction that cuts across those which are commonly made around this issue: between, on the one hand, views that are materialist insofar as they deal with whatever science discovers, taking this to be independent of interpretation; and on the other hand, views that are idealist insofar as they pre-emptively reduce things to a familiar substance, be it mental or neural or subatomic. Seen in the light of this distinction, crude reductionists are a species of idealist. Perverse?

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms. — StreetlightX

This is exactly the problem I have with some of the criticism of reductionism. It must assume that science and materialism are crudely reductionist, because today's science and materialism leave no space for the mystical woo. Thus it would be disastrous for the mystics to accept that science and materialism today are not crudely reductionist in the way that bad pop-science philosophy sometimes suggests.

On the other hand, I suspect you may underestimate the social and ideological importance of this crude reductionism. Fighting against bad pop-science philosophy may be an important battle, even if it's not very philosophically interesting.

A nice critique, and I mostly agree with it. Some scattered thoughts...

A response to one of your arguments is that reductionism does not actually assume what it attempts to disprove, but takes it as a convenient starting point, because that is just how we see the world. What is evidently real may not be what is really real. So even if reductionists begin with a thing to be reduced, they are not committed to the reality of that thing, since the reduction can reveal it to be illusory (or a convenient fiction, an imaginary product of mid-range animal perception, etc). Reductionism thus begins with what is evident and works to uncover what is real beneath it. But this is just mereological nihilism, and as far as metaphysical commitments are apparent in science, I don't think it is a popular view. How many scientists would deny that water exists?

A more moderate reductionist may respond that in beginning with a thing to be reduced, they merely begin with what is evidently real and dig down to find what is more real. Thus they end up with ontological levels or some kind of dualism, which is likely not where they wanted to end up. Another way of putting this is that water does exist, but is nothing more than its parts, such that the privileged way of explaining anything is in terms of parts, if only we knew enough. And the same would then go for Moby Dick and the mind: they exist, but they are nothing but their material parts (and processes?).

This second view is more than a methodological reductionism, but falls short of the target of your critique, so maybe it escapes the charge of assuming what it sets out to disprove, because it doesn't set out to disprove evidently real things at all; it just privileges a certain kind of explanation. But how do they justify this? As you say, they're begging the question.

So, do reductionists believe that water exists? If so, it looks like they might not be full-on reductionists in the exclusive ontological sense at all, or else they're inconsistent in the way you've described. And if not, then they're mereological nihilists. For them, water is merely simples arranged waterwise, so the ontological commitment is to the existence of simples and to the non-existence of meaningful arrangements of those simples.

I would say "ethnic group" is the best way to describe Jews too, but then what is ethnicity? Within ethnic groups you can have shared ethno-racial as well as ethno-religious (and various other) characteristics and there are those who believe Jews exhibit some of the former. — Baden

Yes, although in this discussion I think it probably doesn't matter. Ethnicity can be about shared cultural, historical, linguistic or religious practices and affiliations. For this debate I just wanted to point out that it doesn't follow from a lack of shared racial characteristics that there is no such people as the Jews. Incidentally, it still does not follow if we also find a lack of universal religious observance.

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts. — John

Yes I see, but we're working with some unclear distinctions here, and I suppose I was trying to cover all the bases. In one sense reductionism is a method: the practice of explaining complex things in terms of simpler things, a practice that need not be exclusive or applied everywhere. This methodological reductionism is what I'm allowing for in my post. But yes, I should probably assume ontological reductionism in this discussion, a theory that entails Street's context invariance. Thus what I called reductionist materialism in the strong sense would become reductionism tout court, as you suggest, and the merely methodologically reductionist materialism could become part of a non-reductive materialism, in which other (higher-level) explanations are not only not ruled out, but also recognized as the best or only explanations in some contexts.

"Antisemitic" is a word used by people who think "jew" is a viable category against people that don't like 'jews'. — charleton

If Jews don't exist, who is the target of the prejudice that goes by the name of anti-semitism? This looks like a way of saying that anti-Jewish prejudice does not exist.

I agree that race is irrelevant, but that doesn't go against the standard meaning of "Jew": the Jews are an ethnic group. And to be anti-semitic is to be prejudiced against Jews.

Thompson wins. @Pierre-Normand is going to start the discussion thread in a couple of days, so get reading!

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted. — TheWillowOfDarkness

(Y)

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think. What makes the immaterialists reductionist--or perhaps I should say not anti-reductionist enough--is that they accept that material basis and material causation entail an 'explaining away', just as some materialist reductionists themselves believe. Which is why they can seem eager to deny all materialist description.

Good. Welcome to the forum. :)

Assuming it doesn't win, I think we should do it next month and not bother with a poll.

Yeah it's a tag search. I haven't tagged anything so far, but it could come in handy. For example, if you write something about site functionality and it's not in the usual category, you could tag it so you or others can search for tips on how to use the site. #tips

Edit: Seems to take 10 or so seconds to appear in the results.

Okay PN, Thompson's back in.

Cool, I'll add it to the list and do a poll soon.

Reading it as a kind of conversation, I'm reminded of moments of intense camaraderie. The enthusiasm is infectious, and it does feel more sincere and celebratory than merely mocking or contemptuous.

Maybe the meme, which appears in the novel and, I presume, all over 4chan, is a good exemplar for what you're talking about. But the thought occurs that these accumulating levels of mockery, irony, sincerity and sympathy already happen in face-to-face conversations, especially in banter; it's merely the form that differs. On the other hand, what's crucial in the message board is that this honesty happens more quickly and easily because of the anonymity, and this likely generates interactions of a different kind.

For me these kinds of irony seem to work mainly to enrich relationships that are both on and offline, rather than to distinguish on and offline relationships. But it's quite true that some of the most memorable moments I've had with certain people were chatting online, that it was more than just a peripheral means of communication, and more than just face-to-face conversation carried on by other means.

Just as you're unsympathetic to the appeal to a return to real-world interaction, I'm equally suspicious of the idea that online interaction is a liberation of the true potential of personal relationships, free of the artifice of politeness etc. I know you're not quite espousing that idea yourself, but I imagine there are those more optimistic than you who see it that way, who see a bright authentic cyberfuture rather than disillusionment.

Reading it as a novel, I can't say I like it, exactly. For a start, I'm much too unfamiliar with those communities. And it reads a bit like any old just-for-fun collaborative novel, only with the 4chan and PoMo references specific to their subculture. Plus I found it hard to wade through all the ropey tendrils of spooge.

Thanks for going into that. It's fascinating, but personally I can't say I've experienced anything remotely as complex and interesting, in terms of personal interaction, as the real face-to-face stuff. So I can't quite get a handle on your post-ironic trans-sincerity.

Allow me to ramble about something. Because of my job I'm hardly away from my computer, day and night, but I do make time to go out for bike rides and trips to see places. I plan these trips using various online stuff like route-plotting applications. One feature I particularly like is using a Google map in conjunction with street view. I don't use any kind of sat nav when I'm out so I just memorize the route and what certain crucial road junctions look like on street view.

The thing is, often when I'm out and about I can't remember whether I've actually been there before or have merely seen it on street view. In fact I've been sure I'd been to places that, as it turns out, I'd only seen online. There's something about using street view, quite different from just looking at photographs, that makes it feel like you've really been to a place (no doubt the moving around is a big part of it). And being out, as opposed to being at my computer, although it's great and everything, it doesn't really have the feel of the primary experience any more. Real things are a bit flatter than they used to be. (I suspect this is partly an age thing though.)

You have my sword. — Thorongil

I'm honoured.

And though I used to be one of those who defended pornography, I've changed my mind about it now. I think it really is changing the way people relate to each other, and not in a good way.

With regards to the mainstream media, in some cases, rightly so. Need I provide examples? — Sapientia

No need. You're right, but it's a baby/bathwater thing. It's one thing to dismiss Fox News, but it's another thing to dismiss work by professional journalists in favour of sensational conspiracies peddled by YouTubers.

There is also a post-ironic kind of discourse that only occurs on the internet, and that can really become your bread and butter once you get the hang of it, and make every other mode of human interaction look like socially retarded trash, or culturally dated. — The Great Whatever

What exactly do you mean by this TG? I ask because I'm instinctively one of those who agrees with statements like this from BC:

We all need to get out more to mingle, mix, socialize, gossip, agitate, organize, argue, make love, make war, make peace--real stuff, not virtual reality. — Bitter Crank

Yet it feels a bit too easy to think like this, as if I'm falling back on prejudice. It's facile to say that virtual relationships are eroding real relationships and it's the end of civilization, even if there's some truth in it. I'm interested in an alternative attitude, one that embraces quite different ways of living and interacting.

I like the easy access to (most) information provided for by the Internet. — OglopTo

I do too. It has certainly enriched my life. I wouldn't have been able to read and discuss philosophy without it.

Another way to do it could be to set up a permanent group dedicated to reading something each month, and once you're in the group, you gotta do it. And members would take it in turns to choose the reading material. Come to think of it, that's kind of like a regular reading group isn't it?

It's a cunning plan. The democratic charade makes people think they've made a decision even if their choice doesn't win, and once they've made suggestions and voted, they feel more committed to taking part. I'm just manipulating the masses for the greater good of the Forum. >:)

More seriously, I very much doubt the previous readings would have been as successful without the formalities.

Why? might be a good question, but asking Dawkins why there is life is a bit like asking a military historian why there is war: given that there is war, he wants to know how it works. Which is to say that evolutionary theory doesn't even address the question. Indeed, even aside from the "why" question, as fields of study I think the origin of life is quite distinct from evolution.

To what extent evolutionary theory lends weight to the dethronement of meaning as understood in Christian faith and doctrine is another matter. I happen to think it does, but there have been Christian evolutionary scientists.

So here's a potential list for the poll:

Peter Sloterdijk, "Rules for the Human Zoo"
GEM Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy"
Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit"
Otávio Bueno, "Is Logic A Priori?"

Any more suggestions?

That last one looks like a good contender.

Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed? — Metaphysician Undercover

The question is why the existing empirical evidence doesn't satisfy you. I mean, considering the fact that significant work and thought have gone into these issues since Darwin, I would think the most fruitful approach here in tackling the philosophical problems is to discuss what the existing evidence does and does not prove.

I see that direction in evolution has come up, as supposedly being inconsistent with Darwinian theory and supportive of Lamarck. I'll let others argue against this, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that the arch-materialist villain of the piece, Richard Dawkins, is one of those who argues for the notion of progress in evolution, against those like Stephen Jay Gould, who as far as I can tell are in a minority, who characterize apparent progress as a statistical anomaly--for example, he sees bacteria as the most successful organisms, and they haven't changed much.

I think the key popular books here are The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins, which @Wayfarer has mentioned already, and Gould's Full House (re-titled "Life's Grandeur" in the UK). Though they disagree, both books are thoroughly Darwinist.

This is useful too: http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/5/451.full

Looks good, but I can't find an accessible copy of it.

Yes, and Darwin liked the term so much he started using it himself. These days I think it's more apt to mislead.

Good idea. I don't think it's blatantly obvious at all. In the context of genetic mutation it means that whether a mutation is beneficial or not does not affect the probability that it will occur. However, it seems that some mutations are more probable than others, so the terms "random" and "chance" can be misleading even when applied in the way that is often thought to be correct.

Firstly, of course you're right that selective breeding results in phenotypic changes that are non-random, because which ones survive depends on decisions made by the breeder. But the mutations that result in these changes are random in just the same way as they are in natural selection. Secondly, "survival of the fittest" has not been a popular phrase in Darwinian theory for a long time, partly I think because the notion of survival is misleading in the way you describe, especially when combined with a misleading notion of fitness. But in any case fitness in biology just means reproductive fitness, and what is crucial in the theory is the survival of the traits, not the survival of individuals. Life-span has never been emphasised in the theory in the way you suggest it has. Note also the importance in evolutionary theory of sexual selection, which is precisely about, as you put it, "those physical traits and behaviours which prove to be desirable to a reproductive partner".

Evolutionary biologists agree with you that evolution is not random and is not a matter of chance, but crucially this doesn't entail either that chance has no role in the process, or that there is any purposeful direction of the process.

Perhaps a combined reading with The Art of the Deal? ;)

Time for a financial report.

Cost of site to run: $49/month
Current PayPal balance: $108

Subscriptions for $5/month: 3
Subscriptions for $10/quarter: 4

A couple of members made some generous one-off payments too, and failing that I've put the required money in myself.

In the beginning, PayPal recurring payments were not integrated into PlushForums and subscribing was just a matter of making a one-off payment, though it did set those members to Subscriber status within TPF. I think if recurring payments had been integrated in the beginning, we would have more active subscriptions. I'm hoping some of those people who "subscribed" in the beginning, but whose subscriptions are now inactive because of the upgrade, will let me know so they can subscribe again (thank you to those who've done that).

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/367/subscribe-to-tpf

At some point in the future we'll probably have to move to the next pricing plan, which is $75/month. The main thing causing the move will probably be storage, uploaded files taking up most of that, but I can't seem to find the storage usage screen in the admin dashboard that they added a few months ago. Maybe they removed it again. We can delete unused files if we want to, but I want to avoid that (nothing is really unused unless it's related to deleted posts). Anyway, I'll find out how close we are to our limit and update this post.

The cost of the articles site is $29/year. When it comes time to renew it, I'll probably do so, but my single article is beginning to look very lonely.

I think I already understand the idea of natural selection. [...] — John

Yes that's pretty much the idea. Now we're left with your claim that the analogy with selective breeding is very poor, and your claim that natural selection is a trivial idea that was known about long before Darwin. Questioning the first claim I've tried to show that the analogy is a good one, but I haven't convinced you. I don't know what to do about the other claim except direct you to learn about the history of evolutionary thought, hence the link.

I think I've said all I can, so I'll duck out now and maybe the discussion will recover from this long digression. Sorry about that, Michael and others. :-#

Are you claiming that people had not known about heritable traits for centuries, if not millennia before Darwin? How long do you think selective animal breeding has been going on? Are you claiming that people would not have noticed that unfit animals tend to be less likely to survive than fit animals? The (I think fairly uncontroversial) claims that people had known about heritable traits and that they had noticed the tendency of less fit animals to fail to survive more often than fit ones are the basis of my "baseless intuition". — John

Even if people did know about these, it doesn't amount to the concept of natural selection. So I see no basis here at all.

If you are not claiming either of these then what do you think is the significant advance in thinking Darwin made other than his conjecture about the origin of species (which is irrelevant to any analogy with selective breeding, since the latter does not produce species change so far as is known)? — John

The advance is natural selection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

I don't want to boringly repeat myself, but I think the idea that "selection pressures influencing the distribution of traits in populations" would have long been well understood because the heredity of traits had long been acknowledged (selective animal breeding likely goes back thousands of years) and it is an obvious step from what would have been the common observation that unfit animals are less likely to survive, to the idea that if you don't survive long enough you won't reproduce and pass on your heritable traits. — John

If you think the basic idea of natural selection was obvious and unoriginal, then I'm not surprised you think Darwin is overrated. But you're simply wrong, notwithstanding your vague feeling that it's been known about for centuries. Just because you think it's obvious doesn't mean it has always been obvious.

I reread what I wrote, but couldn't see anything which I thought should lead you to you think I have "conflated the two concepts yet again", I'd be interested to know, though. — John

Here:

To summarise, in the environmental selection case the physiological changes themselves are produced by random (contingent because purposeless) processes, whereas in the selective breeding case the physiological changes are very definitely directed towards an end. — John

You're contrasting physiological changes that occur in nature with those that occur in selective breeding. You say the former are "produced by random processes", but the latter are "directed towards an end".

If "produced by random processes" you're referring to mutations, then you're attempting to draw the distinction I criticized earlier (in summary, my criticism is that because random mutations are equally important in both cases, your distinction is a category error). But if you're referring to selection itself as somehow random, then you're wrong about: natural selection is not random. Or maybe you don't really mean random but just mean to emphasize the blind, purposeless nature of natural selection, in contrast to directedness, in which case we've already been through that: yes, because of this difference the analogy is slightly misleading if you take it to imply a guiding hand, but so long as we keep this in mind the analogy works well.

So you're doing at least one of these: conflating randomness with purposelessness, conflating mutations with selection, repeating yourself, or making the basic mistake of thinking that evolution is random. But it's difficult to know for sure because it's not clear what you're trying to say.

Thanks for clarifying John (though I think you might be conflating the two concepts yet again in your last sentence).

I agree it's important to keep in mind that natural selection is not directed towards an end as it is in artificial selection, but that's kind of obvious if you pay attention to Darwin's argument and doesn't really detract from the power of the analogy. The point of it is that there are selection pressures influencing the distribution of traits in populations, leading to the formation of species in one case and breeds in the other--no matter whether those selection pressures are directed or not.

If you think that I have said something which is "bad mistake" or which implies something I haven't "owned up to" then please point out the particular words you are referring to. — John

Here you bring up the contrast, not between the directedness of selective breeding and the blind process of natural selection, but between the directedness of selective breeding and the randomness of mutations:

The point is that it is here, with this notion of 'randomness', that the analogy with selective breeding fails, because the changes brought about in the lattere are very carefully planned. — John

And I've already explained why this is a mistake. Random mutations happen in both cases, and the difference is in how those mutations are selected, or if you prefer, how they come to survive and get passed on.

Also you're assertion that those who do not like the analogy do not understand is, frankly, insulting. I also don't think that what you claim the analogy shows is anything other than trivial because I think it is very implausible that intelligent people would not already, for thousands of years prior to Darwin, have understood very well that people and animals may be more or less well or ill suited to survive under different conditions. — John

That this was a fundamental mechanism of the creation of species, in the way that selective breeding is the mechanism of the creation of breeds, was utterly new to science and thought. Just what is it that you think Darwin actually discovered, if anything?

But to answer your direct question: the analogy shows us that the traits that come to define species do so because the bearers of those traits survive to pass them on owing to their suitability to the conditions, i.e., the prevailing selection pressures. If you think this is trivial, you have the analogy to thank for that.