Final Causation
God On The Cheap
A Limited Defense of Stuart Kauffman et. al.
O.k., so I take the idea of final causation (that is independent of (human, etc.) agents) seriously. I don't believe that there are (non-agent-grounded) final causes, but I don't believe there aren't any, either. For one thing, I am attracted by Peirce's view that belief is out of place in science. But, more to the point, I'm just not sure about final causation. But I take the idea seriously. This makes me something of a kook, at least from the perspective of contemporary philosophy and science.
Meh. Whatever.
The final causalist ends up located, in a sense, between the creationist and the ateleolotical Darwinian, who holds that all reference to ends in evolutionary theory is eliminable--he thinks there are ends in the world, but he doesn't goes so far as to think that there's an agent behind those ends. In another, more important sense, he's farther out than the creationist. How so? Well, most (though not all) philosophers admit that agents (and, derivatively, artifacts) can really have purposes or ends; but non-agents (e.g. processes) cannot. In fact, that seems to be one motive for creationism: there seem to be ends in nature, but only agents (and, derivatively, artifacts) can have ends, so nature must be the artifact of an agent, viz., God.
(None of this explains how agents can have purposes, of course...but, to be fair, it isn't supposed to. That's a different question. But eventually that theoretical promissory note will have to be paid. And, as my old prof Jay Rosenberg used to say, you don't solve a problem just by taking it indoors--that is, by shoving it into the mind.)
So, anyway, in this sense, the hypothesis that there are real final causes in nature is opposed to both ateleological Darwinianism and creationism. Like Darwinians who think that talk of ends in evolution is serious, the final causalist thinks that there are real ends in nature. E.g. survival and reproduction, to point to the obvious examples.
Defense of the final causation hypothesis is beyond the scope of this blog to say the least--not to mention my abilities. But for an excellent look at the issues and defense of the hypothesis, let me recommend T. L. Short's excellent Peirce's Theory of Signs. That's a damn fine book right there my friends.
The point I want to make here is just that folks like Stuart Kaufmann are, by my (admittedly rather dim) lights, not crazy. I think they're motivated by the same considerations that motivate those who are trying to make sense of final causation. The motive is the same motive that generated teleological theories in the first place, in antiquity: purely mechanistic theories don't seem to be able to account for all phenomena.
Getting teloi into nature doesn't require God, but it's not crazy to describe a purposeful nature as godlike in some attenuated sense. And I take it that that's what folks like Kauffman are up to. So, FWIW, I don't think they're crazy in the least.
Wow. So not only am I currently rather sympathtic to neo-pantheists (or whatever these guys are), I'm fairly annoyed with the trendy pop atheists like Dawkins and Harris. Jeez, what next? Prayer in school? Frothing about the evils of gay marriage? Stay tuned!
God On The Cheap
A Limited Defense of Stuart Kauffman et. al.
O.k., so I take the idea of final causation (that is independent of (human, etc.) agents) seriously. I don't believe that there are (non-agent-grounded) final causes, but I don't believe there aren't any, either. For one thing, I am attracted by Peirce's view that belief is out of place in science. But, more to the point, I'm just not sure about final causation. But I take the idea seriously. This makes me something of a kook, at least from the perspective of contemporary philosophy and science.
Meh. Whatever.
The final causalist ends up located, in a sense, between the creationist and the ateleolotical Darwinian, who holds that all reference to ends in evolutionary theory is eliminable--he thinks there are ends in the world, but he doesn't goes so far as to think that there's an agent behind those ends. In another, more important sense, he's farther out than the creationist. How so? Well, most (though not all) philosophers admit that agents (and, derivatively, artifacts) can really have purposes or ends; but non-agents (e.g. processes) cannot. In fact, that seems to be one motive for creationism: there seem to be ends in nature, but only agents (and, derivatively, artifacts) can have ends, so nature must be the artifact of an agent, viz., God.
(None of this explains how agents can have purposes, of course...but, to be fair, it isn't supposed to. That's a different question. But eventually that theoretical promissory note will have to be paid. And, as my old prof Jay Rosenberg used to say, you don't solve a problem just by taking it indoors--that is, by shoving it into the mind.)
So, anyway, in this sense, the hypothesis that there are real final causes in nature is opposed to both ateleological Darwinianism and creationism. Like Darwinians who think that talk of ends in evolution is serious, the final causalist thinks that there are real ends in nature. E.g. survival and reproduction, to point to the obvious examples.
Defense of the final causation hypothesis is beyond the scope of this blog to say the least--not to mention my abilities. But for an excellent look at the issues and defense of the hypothesis, let me recommend T. L. Short's excellent Peirce's Theory of Signs. That's a damn fine book right there my friends.
The point I want to make here is just that folks like Stuart Kaufmann are, by my (admittedly rather dim) lights, not crazy. I think they're motivated by the same considerations that motivate those who are trying to make sense of final causation. The motive is the same motive that generated teleological theories in the first place, in antiquity: purely mechanistic theories don't seem to be able to account for all phenomena.
Getting teloi into nature doesn't require God, but it's not crazy to describe a purposeful nature as godlike in some attenuated sense. And I take it that that's what folks like Kauffman are up to. So, FWIW, I don't think they're crazy in the least.
Wow. So not only am I currently rather sympathtic to neo-pantheists (or whatever these guys are), I'm fairly annoyed with the trendy pop atheists like Dawkins and Harris. Jeez, what next? Prayer in school? Frothing about the evils of gay marriage? Stay tuned!
posted by Winston Smith at
7:43 AM
7 Comments:
1. I love that book.
2. You first seem to be claiming that you are neutral towards the idea about whether or not final causes exist, but you qualify this neutrality by saying you don't believe that there are non-agent-grounded final causes and you don't believe there aren't any non-agent-grounded final causes.
From this, you say that someone who believes in Final Causes is between ateleological Darwinism and creationism since Darwinians who are ateleological don't believe in final causes. However, you then say "Like Darwinians who think that talk of ends in evolution is serious, the final causalist thinks that there are real ends in nature". I'm guessing you're now no longer speaking of ateleological Darwinians.
Anyway, my thing was: doesn't Short's book represent, in part, an attempt at constructing an idea of final causality which doesn't require agency in order to exist? He claims that the second law of thermodynamics, for instance, is a kind of final cause, but there's no agency there if you're talking about agency in the sense that something's mind has conceived of this final cause as a purpose.
Seemed to me that Short was saying that purposes are kinds of final causes held by agents, but that final causes aren't exclusively limited to agents with purposes. They can exist in nature, agent-independent as well.
I just read your middle paragraph again after "Meh. Whatever." so I think what you're saying is more clear than I thought it was.
Regardless, I still think that Short was trying to make the point that non-agents, like processes, can have final causes, which I think is what you mean by "purposes or ends".
Right. What I said--or at least meant--was: as far as non-agent grounded teloi go: it's a hypothesis I take seriously. But belief is out of place in science, so I refrain from believing in them.
Yeah, I agree about the point of the Short book.
Oh. Hooray!
I can't tell you how much I love the idea of final causation being a real thing. I don't know why. It just seems exciting and important to me. So much so that it actually makes me happier to think about it. Is that weird?
How does Peirce understand "belief" in the context you're talking about, WS? In the "Fixation of Belief" essay, in any case, I got the impression that there was nothing epistemically suspect about belief. Does he redefine the term later somewhere to mean something like "assent without sufficient evidence"?
Hey, someone got philosophy in my politics blog... Can we expect this trend to continue through to the inauguration?
But seriously: For those of us whose fine bookstores and small-town libraries do not have Short's book, could you provide a short version of the argument as to why the 2nd law of thermodynamics, say, should count as having a natural telos? On the face of it, most examples of natural teloi require appeal to intentions to pick out the end-giving property. Entropy, for instance, is defined normally in terms of the error of a statistical model, and health, another common example from biology, requires a representation of the animal type. I'm having a hard time thinking of examples of natural teloi that neither collapse into ateleology, like defining health by actual offspring, nor make use of expectation.
That being said, if one can come up with examples of entirely mind-independent ends, then you can turn the reduction around, since endedness is just about the best way to pick out the mental from other types of objects.
Going to respond, A, but today's the first day of my break...started to, but it was too much like work!
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