Walsh, "Teleology"

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1a) How would we characterize the field of Walsh's intervention?  Is this an intervention in philosophy of biology?  In philosophy of science?  What about its scalability to other fields, like social/political or environmental philosophy? 

1b) Can these ideas about non-mechanistic explanation be applied to fields outside of biology and how?

1c) How does this paper relate to interdisicplinary research between philosophy and science?

2) Walsh develops an argument about the relationship between teleology and normativity (7; elsewhere).  How would we characterize this relationship?

3) What does it mean to show a phenomenon's place in the causal order of the world? Is there something beyond biological ascriptions and explanatory practices?

4) How does organism's goal-directedness apply environmentally?

5) What is the relationship between teleology and essentialism?

6) What is the historical apriori for this argument, and for a shift from a populational to an organismic conception of evolution?

We then moved to discussion:

Wrt purpose, it was noted that Hegel salutes Kant for bringing the idea of immanent purpose back into biology but also claims that Kant betrays his own view with a merely regulative conception of purposiveness.

For Walsh, "purpose" and "goal" seem to be coextensive.  What he seems to want to avoid is a conception of purpose as intentional.  This is what is at stake in his argument against a Platonist conception of teleology.  For Walsh, organisms do not represent, such that concepts are not part of the idea of purposiveness.

• There is an important distinction for Walsh between internal purpose and external purpose. External purpose is one that is given or imposed on an object (e.g., a chair is for sitting). Internal purpose is essential to [?] the functioning, maintenance, of a system.
  

But wouldn't Walsh still need a distinction between intentional/conceptual purposiveness and nonintentional purposiveness?  (Wouldn't he accept that some objects or processes, for ex. humans, wield purposes conceptually?)

• Non-goal-directed (nonpurposive)
• Ex. a rock
  
• Non-goal-directed (nonpurposive) self-organizing (systems)
• Ex. a crystal
  
• Goal-directed (purposive) and non-intentional
  
•  Ex. an organism
  
• Goal-directed (purposive) intentional events or processes
  
• Ex. a human belief
  

Walsh's main argument is to establish a distinction between the goal-directed and non-goal-directed events and processes (i.e., his argument is to establish the third category above).

• Evidence for the third category is agency, understood as self-regulative plasticity in response to perturbations
• Paradigmatic instances are persistence, growth, reproduction, etc..
  

Walsh, "Objectcy and Agency" + Lewontin selection

 

Questions

 

1.      What does Walsh mean by a “non-standard scientific theory”? How is biological explanation empirical?

2.      What is the connection between agencies and natural normativity?

3.      Are the social sciences object theories? Are objects the primary substance in common sense ontology?

4.      What is the distinction between organicism and methodological vitalism? What kind of distinction is being made between organism and environmental? Pragmatic? Metaphysical?

5.      What can we learn methodologically doing this historical work? What can we take away from Walsh’s methodological vitalism?

6.      Distinction between problem/solution model and organisms as problem solvers? How does this approach to problems link with Walsh’s methodological intervention?

7.      What does it mean to take the organism/environment relation as constitutive of the Anthropocene or climate change?

 

Notes

-        Anthropocene and social metabolism

-        Relation to feminist philosophy of science (Harding: Haraway) and ecofeminism (Plumwood): concept of co-constitution. Question: what is the environment? Isn’t the environment an organism itself?

-        Organism – environment relation

o   Is the organism too autonomous or even dominating? Lewontin seem to put too much emphasis on the autonomy of the organism and to overstate the impact of the organism on the environment. What about the effects of the environment?

-        There is a problem when we think in terms of subject-object. Haraway has challenged this way of thinking. We might need a new vocabulary to provide an adequate account of nature, life, etc.

-        Context: Kant’s Third Antinomy Problem: could agency be used to describe the environment? If agency is the overarching concept, how should we understand this in the organism-environment distinction?
Maybe thinking in terms of spontaneity and receptivity, would be different.

-        Life as a metaphysical fact – pragmatic distinction in terms of what organisms actually do in order to effectuate processes and, thus, it is also a metaphysical claim. They are not completely bound to the laws of nature.

-        It seems that Lewontin’s description of how molecules are not subject to the same laws as organisms (among other examples) could be seen as an analogous case to Einstein’s theory of relativity in opposition to the Newtonian framework as one that is absolute.

-        Walsh: vocabulary to understand or explain the self-determination and active nature of organisms.

-        Explanation of animal action: there are different kinds. Is there a notion of agency that could be applied both in the case of genetic and teleological explanations? Is there a notion that could connect the multiple language-games or types of explanations for understanding organism-environmental?

-        Darwin: rejection of model of certain materialist history and an understanding of change. Would that entail a non-agential world (Walsh)? Lewontin seems to disagree: practical activity is not undertaken by huma labor but we should extend materialism to nonhuman agents. Expansion of concepts of perception, language, etc.

-        Intervention into a materialist history of organisms: What kind of category is agency in Marxist materialism? Social and political. But this could be expanded. These explanations would not have to be separated of biological explanations or accounts.

-        Again: feminist materialists (Haraway) have a lot to contribute in order to understand the interdependence of beings and the environment.

-        Lewontin: resuscitate the Aristotelian ethical hope that when we find value in life, that relates to a value-seeking pursuit that is shared with other living beings. Empirical account of biological function that is not only deterministic (based on trait) it means that we can think again of what it is to conceptualize a good life.

-        Colin’s diagrams: left – explanation of two models of environment-organism. Right – diagrams compared to Foucault’s understanding of subject-power relation

-        Connection to the issue of reflexivity (Bremner): you don’t need autonomy when you reach certain level of complexity.

-        Fox Keller: challenging the need for an initial cause.

 

 

  

D.J. Nicholson and R. Gawne on Organicism

For a few weeks, we will be reading and discussing ideas related to the philosophy of biology. We started this segment with D.J. Nicholson and R. Gawne's paper "Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism: What the philosophy of biology was."

Our discussion began with questions: 

• Are the authors arguing for essentializing the idea of biology? Is the idea that biology is autonomous? Would such a claim involve disregarding the history of biology?
• Why is the organicism suggested by the authors committed to natural hierarchies? Are they some potential dangers involved in a hierarchical view of nature?
• What does count as inclusion in the philosophy of biology? What is the domain of this field and what are its disciplinary norms?
•  Is the organicist perspective caught in old frameworks and potentially outdated scientific assumptions? Does organicism pay enough attention to contemporary biology?
• What kind of history does the paper engage in? Is it a history of discourse, ideas or…?What does it tell us about the methodology of the paper?
• Can the history of philosophy of biology be mapped to the reception of Kant?
• Is organicism better equipped to deal with normative questions, in comparison to vitalism & logical empiricism? How is bioethics related or maybe intersecting with the philosophy of biology?
• What are the exact differences between organicism & vitalism? Aren't there ultimately intersections and similarities between the two?
• Autonomy of biology vs. biological exceptionalism? Is organicism successful in tying them apart, or do they remain indistinguishable?

We started the discussion by considering the relation between vitalism and organicism. Given that some vitalists like Bergson can be considered organicists in some ways, maybe the boundary between the two perspectives is not as clear as the paper argues. This would especially depend on our reading of Bergson, and how we understand his claim that living things can be grasped and understood through intuition only. Bergson does not deny the possibility of understanding living things, but such understanding does not happen in rational terms (i.e., through intellect and rationality, as Kantians would say). That being said, the dualism between rationality and intention might not matter as much in the contemporary philosophy of biology.

We considered the author’s mapping of the history of philosophy of biology and discussed the possibilities of writing this history in different ways. For example, it seems that the philosophy of biology can be traced back to Aristotle as well, if we define the field in a broader sense and do not link it to academic professionalism of the last century. The question remains what is at stake at these definitions and distinctions, and whether philosophy of Biology is a sociological subfield or a conceptual field/subdiscipline. 

We also considered different reasons why biology needs to be considered autonomous, and whether this thesis can be challenged in contemporary sciences. The idea of the autonomy of biology suggests that biology cannot be explained through physics and other disciplines. Biological mode of explanation is different and unique and should not be reduced to other modes of explanation. This suggests that life cannot be explained simply through evolutionary terms, a perspective that can be traced back to Aristotle.

Our discussion also considered some of the challenges to the organicist hierarchical view of nature posed by the work of some other scholars such as Evelin Fox Keller. Her work has rejected the validity of the natural hierarchy thesis and has shown that some organisms do not contain different levels of hierarchy within themselves. Additionally, we considered the relation between organicism and genetic biology, and how the organicist perspective overcomes some of the limitations of genetic determinism. Specifically, we discussed how genetic biology has difficulty explaining epigenetics and the contingency of the transformations in organisms. This can be one reason why the focus on the organism is important. Additionally, organicism sheds light on the dynamic relationship between the organism and its environment and enables an account of biological agency that can be important for our current understandings of biology.