Author: Huenemann

Review of Rosenberg, An atheist’s guide to reality

Here. I haven’t read Rosenberg’s book yet, but from this review, it sounds like the book at least presents a clear expression of a full-blown, “mad-dog scientism” world view. As the reviewer summarizes the view’s outcomes,

There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.

Of course, the big problem most people start worrying over at this point is: then why should I care about other people, and doing the right thing? The reviewer answers on Rosenberg’s behalf:

But then, if there are no categorical imperatives (except linguistically) don’t abhorrent values become equal with decent ones? If there’s nothing in the naturalistic worldview to underwrite goodness then Hitler is equal to Gandhi. Rosenberg accepts this but says we shouldn’t worry. Rosenberg says we are all just hard-wired to be nice. Morals are for him a type of norm expressivism. There are facts paired to norms that form a core system that’s universal, shared as a kind of species bedrock. As a species we’ve evolved the same values. There are other facts then that these pairings interact with, local ones including eco systems. So Rosenberg argues that as a species we share the same values and and that all moral disagreement is about factual matters if it persists beyond clearing up background cultural things.

Well, that’s lucky for us. Or I guess I shouldn’t think of it as lucky. It’s just the way things turned out, and since they turned out that way, I end up feeling good about it. Had we evolved to lie, cheat, and steal — or if in the coming centuries, we decide to breed ourselves in that direction — then we’ll feel lucky about that too. I’m feeling better already!

Teleological explanation in biology

Some of you may have been drawn into an argument Kleiner and I have been having about the role of teleological explanation in biology. Often, teleological explanation gets described in such a way as to imply that current states of a system should be explained by later states of a system: e.g., that an acorn grows into an oak because that later stage, being an oak, somehow pulls the little acorn in that direction. But that is evidently a mistaken view of how teleological explanation is supposed to work.

Well, how then is it supposed to work? In doing a little research, I came across an older essay (1970) by biologist Franciso Ayala (who lectured on our campus some few years ago) entitled, appropriately enough, “Teleological explanations in evolutionary biology,” and published in the journal Philosophy of Science. I’m going to offer an extended excerpt that I find very clear and helpful:

[…] In this generic sense, teleological explanations are those explanations where the presence of an object or a process in a system is explained by exhibiting its connection with a specific state or property of the system to whose existence or maintenance the object or process contributes. Teleological explanations require that the object or process contribute to the existence of a certain state or property of the system. Moreover, they imply that such contribution is the explanatory reason for the presence of the process or object in the system. It is appropriate to give a teleological explanation of the operation of the kidney in regulating the concentration of salt in the blood, or of the structure of the hand obviously adapted for grasping. But it makes no sense to explain teleologically the falling of a stone, or a chemical reaction.

There are at least three categories of biological phenomena where teleological explanations are appropriate, although the distinction between the categories need not always be clearly defined. These three classes of teleological phenomena are established according to the mode of relationship between the object or process and the end-state or property that accounts for its presence.

(1) When the end-state or goal is consciously anticipated by the agent. This is purposeful activity and it occurs in man and probably in other animals. I am acting teleologically when I pick up a pencil and paper in order to express in writing my ideas about teleology. A deer running away from a mountain lion, or a bird building its nest, has at least the appearance of purposeful behavior.

(2) In connection with self-regulating or teleonomic systems, when there exists a mechanism that enables the system to reach or to maintain a specific property in spite of environmental fluctuations. The regulation of body temperature in mammals is of this kind. In general the homeostatic reactions of organisms belong to this category of teleological phenomena. Two types of homeostasis are usually distinguished by biologists-physiological and developmental homeostasis, although intermediate situations may exist. Physiological homeostatic reactions enable the organism to maintain certain physiological steady states in spite of environmental shocks. The regulation of the composition of the blood by the kidneys, or the hypertrophy of a structure like muscle due to strenuous use, are examples of this type of homeostasis. Developmental homeostasis refers to the regulation of the different paths that an organism may follow in its progression from zygote to adult. Self-regulating systems or servo-mechanisms built by man are teleological in this second sense. The simplest example of such servo-mechanisms is a thermostat unit that maintains a specified room temperature by turning on and off the source of heat. Self-regulating mechanisms of this kind, living or man-made, are controlled by a feed-back system of information.

(3) In reference to structures anatomically and physiologically designed to perform a certain function. The hand of man is made for grasping, and his eye for vision. Tools and certain types of machines made by man are teleological in this sense. A watch for instance, is made to tell time, and a faucet to draw water. The distinction between this and the previous category of teleological systems is some-times blurred. Thus the human eye is able to regulate itself within a certain range to the conditions of brightness and distance so as to perform its function more effectively.

Teleological mechanisms in living organisms are biological adaptations. They have arisen as a result of the process of natural selection. The adaptations of organisms-whether organs, homeostatic mechanisms, or patterns of behavior-are explained teleologically in that their existence is accounted for in terms of their contribution to the reproductive fitness of the population. As explained above, a feature of an organism that increases its reproductive fitness will be selectively favored. Given enough time it will extend to all the members of the population.

Huenemann’s 4910 in the spring: Hume

Each term I try to offer a single “Readings and research” course so I don’t end up scattering myself over too many readings. I was going to offer one next term in philosophy of law, but I haven’t had any students express strong interest in that, whereas I have had some students express some other interests, so I’ve decided to make the subject David Hume’s philosophy. It’s only open to students who are near to finishing (or have finished) the classes required for the Philosophy major. If you think you’re interested, send me a note, or catch me for a conversation.

Hume on causal knowledge

In Early Modern Philosophy we have come to Hume’s critique of causality (Enquiry, section 4). I have always had difficulty getting the nature of his critique straight in my mind. So I sat down to try to put it clearly, and came up with the following. Nothing new or original here – just what I hope is a clear articulation of one of Hume’s great insights.

We all know what happens in the story that begins, “David Hume came to a fork in the road….” The two tines of the fork are marked “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact,” which Hume regards as “the only two objects of human reason.” What makes a true relation of ideas true is the fact that when you try to deny it, you contradict yourself. What makes a true matter of fact true is … a good question. Hume would like to find an answer to it. He observes that every purported matter of fact is founded in one way or another upon cause and effect. From what we immediately perceive we infer a cause; from our memories, we infer a past event; from our past experience of two events being always conjoined, we infer the second from evidence of the first. And so on. So, he claims, if we want to know what makes true matters of fact true, we need to know what makes causal claims true. Hume then proceeds to demonstrate that general causal claims are not relations of ideas, since if you deny a causal claim, you will not thereby contradict yourself (though you will run the risk of sounding silly). But neither are general causal claims matters of fact, since … well, since why? Remember, we are trying to figure out what makes true matters of fact true. We don’t know the answer yet.

Hmm. Well, practically, what Hume ends up assuming is that a true matter of fact is true in virtue of accurately capturing what is present in our experience. So I eat some bread, and it nourishes me. I eat some more, and it nourishes me, too. The true matter of fact issuing from this experience is that the bread I have eaten on these two occasions has nourished me. But typically we also infer something much stronger: that the bread that I will eat in the future also will nourish me, or that bread always has nourishing qualities (under similar conditions). But these claims do not accurately capture what is present in my experience, if only for the reason that the future, let alone what “always” happens, is not present in my experience.

If this is enough to disqualify general causal claims as matters of fact, then Hume has succeeded in showing that causal claims are not objects of human reason. What does that mean? It does not mean that we should be skeptical of causal claims. It means we should not take ourselves to have any real understanding of why they are true. As he writes towards the end of part I of section 4:

Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse; these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we discover in nature; and we may esteem ourselves sufficiently happy, if, by accurate inquiry and reasoning, we can trace up the particular phenomena to, or near to, these general principles. The most perfect philosophy staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover to larger portions of it [namely, our ignorance]. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our efforts to elude it or avoid it.